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JK Rowling will publish a fairy tale called The Ickabog free online so that children can read it in lockdown

  • JK Rowling will publish a fairy tale called The Ickabog free online so that children can read it in lockdown
    JK Rowling will publish a fairy tale called The Ickabog free online so that children can read it in lockdown

"I've decided to publish the Ickabog for free online, so children on lockdown, or even those back at school during these strange, unsettling times, can read it or have it read to them."

"Over 10 years ago, I wrote a stand-alone fairy tale called The Ickabog," Rowling said. “Until very recently, the only people who’d heard the story of The Ickabog were my two younger children.”

The Harry Potter author said the mostly handwritten manuscript had been stored in her attic until a few weeks ago and she had done some rewriting in recent weeks. She said:

I've decided to publish The Ickabog for free online, so children on lockdown, or even those back at school during these strange, unsettling times, can read it or have it read to them.

We’ll be publishing a chapter (or 2 or 3) every weekday, starting at 3.00pm today and ending on July 10th. You don't need to register to access the story. You can read it for free on a new website we’ll be launching shortly.

She is also launching a competition for children to send in pictures which will be used to illustrate the book when it is officially in November.

All author royalties from the books will be to donated to “projects and organizations helping the groups most impacted by Covid-19”, Rowling said.

About The Ickabog

The idea for The Ickabog came to me while I was still writing Harry Potter. I wrote most of a first draft in fits and starts between Potter books, intending to publish it after Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

However, after the last Potter book I wanted to take a break from publishing, which ended up lasting five years. In that time I wrote The Casual Vacancy and Robert Galbraith wrote The Cuckoo’s Calling. After some dithering (and also after my long-suffering agent had trademarked The Ickabog – sorry, Neil) I decided I wanted to step away from children’s books for a while. At that point, the first draft of The Ickabog went up into the attic, where it’s remained for nearly a decade. Over time I came to think of it as a story that belonged to my two younger children, because I’d read it to them in the evenings when they were little, which has always been a happy family memory.

A few weeks ago at dinner, I tentatively mooted the idea of getting The Ickabog down from the attic and publishing it for free, for children in lockdown. My now teenagers were touchingly enthusiastic, so downstairs came the very dusty box, and for the last few weeks I’ve been immersed in a fictional world I thought I’d never enter again. As I worked to finish the book, I started reading chapters nightly to the family again. This was one of the most extraordinary experiences of my writing life, as The Ickabog’s first two readers told me what they remember from when they were tiny, and demanded the reinstatement of bits they’d particularly liked (I obeyed).

I think The Ickabog lends itself well to serialisation because it was written as a read-aloud book (unconsciously shaped, I think, by the way I read it to my own children), but it’s suitable for 7-9 year olds to read to themselves.

I’ll be posting a chapter (or two, or three) every weekday between 26th May and 10th July on The Ickabog website. We plan to publish some translations soon and will post further details on that website when they’re available.

The Ickabog is a story about truth and the abuse of power.  To forestall one obvious question: the idea came to me well over a decade ago, so it isn’t intended to be read as a response to anything that’s happening in the world right now. The themes are timeless and could apply to any era or any country.

"THIS IS NOT A HARRY POTTER SPIN-OFF," she emphasized on Twitter, to head off "one possible source of confusion."