J.K. Rowling worked at Amnesty International in London before becoming a novelist.
After graduating from the University of Exeter, Rowling moved to London and worked as a researcher and bilingual secretary for Amnesty International. Her role involved reading and translating material, including reports concerning human-rights abuses.
Rowling has described this work as an influence on her imagination. She encountered accounts of people who had disappeared or been imprisoned, and she later connected those experiences with the idea of people being forced to live under oppressive power in the Harry Potter world.
This job was one stage in her pre-publication career. She later lived in Portugal, returned to the United Kingdom, and began developing the Harry Potter manuscript. The London workplace is sometimes confused with Exeter, where she studied, or Edinburgh, where she later lived while writing.