Which London organization employed J.K. Rowling as a researcher and bilingual secretary?

Amnesty International employed J.K. Rowling as a researcher and bilingual secretary.

After graduating from the University of Exeter, Rowling worked in London for Amnesty International. Her role involved research and secretarial work, and she used her knowledge of French in the organization’s international environment. She has described reading reports about human-rights abuses during this period.

That work did not directly create the Harry Potter plot, but Rowling later connected it with her understanding of persecution, intolerance, and the ways people can be treated as outsiders. Those themes appear throughout the novels, especially in the treatment of Muggle-born witches and wizards and in the rise of Voldemort’s ideology.

Before and after her Amnesty job, Rowling held other administrative positions and continued writing. The idea for Harry Potter came to her during a delayed train journey from Manchester to London in 1990, several years before the first book was published. Her professional path therefore combined language study, office work, activism-related research, and fiction writing.