What is J.K. Rowling’s middle initial said to stand for?

J.K. Rowling’s middle initial is said to stand for Kathleen. Her birth name is Joanne Rowling, and Kathleen was the name of her paternal grandmother.

Rowling did not originally write under the initials J.K. When Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was prepared for publication, Bloomsbury asked her to use two initials rather than her full first name. The publisher reportedly feared that boys might avoid a book written by a woman if the author’s gender were obvious from the cover.

Rowling selected the initial K and became J.K. Rowling for her fiction. She has no recorded middle name in the ordinary sense, so Kathleen was adopted as a professional middle initial rather than being part of the name given to her at birth.

This is distinct from her later Robert Galbraith pseudonym, which she used for crime fiction. J.K. Rowling remains the public author name most strongly associated with the Harry Potter novels.