Thursday, Aug 21, 2008
Aug 16, 2004 | EDINBURGH, Scotland (AP) -- "Harry Potter" novelist J.K. Rowling says her young hero will survive to the seventh book in her series about the young wizard, but refused to say whether he would reach adulthood.
Rowling teased a group of fans with morsels of information as she gave a reading of "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Sunday.
"He will survive to book seven, mainly because I don't want to be strangled by you lot, but I don't want to say whether he grows any older than that," Rowling told the youngsters.
She encouraged the fans to try to piece together future plots for themselves, and urged them to focus on why Harry's nemesis, the evil warlock Voldemort, had not been killed.
"There are two questions I don't think I've ever been asked and that I should have been asked, if you know what I mean," Rowling said.
She told the gathering they should be asking themselves "not `why did Harry live' but `why didn't Voldemort die?'"
The second question they should think about is: "Why didn't Dumbledore kill, or try to kill, Voldemort?" she added, referring to the headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
More than 500 people had tickets to see the author read from the fifth book. She is still working on the sixth book, but has already revealed the title: `"Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince."
But she remained tightlipped about the title of her final book in the series.
"I'm not going to tell you, I'm sorry. The trouble I would be in if I did. My agent would have me hunted down and killed," she said.
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