Author of a literary phenomenon, national treasure, rags-to-riches inspiration and all-round remarkable woman. Whichever way you know her, it's hard not to be a little obsessed with J. K. Rowling.

As her latest book Very Good Lives: The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination goes on sale this week - a beautifully illustrated version of her ground-breaking 2008 Harvard speech - we dig deeper into all things J.K. Rowling and uncover a few inspiring, captivating and amusing facts you may not know about the brilliant author...

There's a very personal reason that King's Cross takes such a key role in Harry Potter

In the Harry Potter books, Hogwarts students famously catch the school train from fictitious platform nine and three-quarters at King's Cross station. While we know that the idea of the boy wizard came to J. K. Rowling while on a crowded train back to London from Manchester, the iconic London station is in fact where Rowling's parents James and Anne first met when they were 18. They married one year later and were together until her mother died at the age of 45 from multiple sclerosis (MS).

“For me… King’s Cross Station is a very, very romantic place, probably the most romantic station, purely because my parents met here. So, that’s always been part of my childhood folklore. So, I wanted Harry to go to Hogwarts by train…and obviously, therefore, it had to be from King’s Cross,” she says.

Her name is continuously mispronounced

Rowling rhymes with bowling, not howling, but the author says she's stopped minding people getting her name wrong.

She wrote her first story at the age of six

“…a work of towering genius about a rabbit, called Rabbit. I gave it to my mother who said, ‘That’s lovely,’ as a mother would. ‘That’s very, very good.’ I stood there, thinking, ‘Well, get it published then.’ Bit of an odd thing for a child of six to think. I don’t know where it came from…”

Her literary heroine is Jo March from Little Women

"It is hard to overstate what she meant to a small, plain girl called Jo, who had a hot temper and a burning ambition to be a writer," Rowling told The New York Times.

20 fascinating facts about J.K. Rowling you probably never knew