London — Harry Potter author JK Rowling released her first children’s Christmas book on Tuesday. Inspired by the lockdown and her son’s stuffed toy pigs, The Christmas Pig is about “being lost and being found, about loving and being loved, about what stays with us and what falls away,” Rowling wrote in The Sunday Times of London.
“It’s also about hope and endurance,” said Rowling, explaining that since her son David was a baby, he’d had a much-loved toy pig that he kept on hiding and losing.
That prompted her to buy him an identical toy – just in case the original got lost for good. But David soon found the newcomer and declared the pair to be brothers.
“The original pig is now extremely worn and battered,” Rowling wrote in the newspaper about how the idea for the book developed. “However, the second pig still looks more or less as he did when bought. He was never loved the same way, never invested with the strange power we give beloved toys when we’re young. So one day I got thinking about that, about what it means to be a replacement,”
For almost a decade, the idea had been in in the one-time billionaire writer’s mind (her generous charitable giving got her “demoted” to mere multi-millionaire), but the pandemic lockdowns gave her the impetus to realise it, as reported by Geo.tv.
“I first had the idea back in 2012, and finally finished it last year, at a time when the pandemic was still raging and I was unusually aware of the need for human connection,” she said.
“I think that’s why I kept imagining it being read aloud while working on it, something I’ve never done with any other book.”
For the release, the author courted relatively little publicity, with her recent appearances in the newspapers dominated by her row with the transgender community.
That began nearly two years ago when Rowling tweeted about the use of the phrase “people who menstruate”. “I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?,” she wrote.
The message caused a rift with several stars of the Harry Potter movies, including lead actor Daniel Radcliffe, who tweeted an apology. “Transgender women are women,” he wrote in a post.
Rowling said that “accusations and threats from trans activists have been bubbling in my Twitter timeline” ever since.
“Huge numbers of women are justifiably terrified by the trans activists; I know this because so many have got in touch with me to tell their stories,” she wrote.
The uproar over Rowling’s stance has widened and triggered a polarising debate about transgender rights and free speech. In the UK, a Labour MP, Rosie Duffield, pulled out of her party’s annual conference last month after receiving online threats when militant transgender activists slammed remarks she made as transphobic.
And at the University of Sussex, a philosophy professor, Kathleen Stock faces accusations of transphobia and a campagin calling for her to be sacked, after she stated that people can change gender but not biological sex./TISG