The interview takes place at the stately Bonham Hotel in this ancient city where Rowling lives. She pulls up in a silver minivan driven by her second husband, Neil Murray, 36, a general practitioner she married in 2001. She leans toward him, gives him a kiss and, looking very hip, steps out in a blue-and-black-striped tunic, fitted jeans and black high-heeled boots.
Rowling - who recalls sobbing as she finished writing the final Potter book - appears relaxed and happy after a 17-year stretch in which she produced the seven Potter books that became a lifeblood to booksellers and attracted millions of young fans.
In the weeks leading up to Hallows' release, there was intense speculation about whether the teenage Harry would survive a final showdown of good vs. evil with his archnemesis, the Dark Lord, Voldemort.
In the book, Voldemort meets his end and Harry survives. Rowling says Harry's survival was not always guaranteed, however.
"In the early days, everything was up for grabs," she says. "But early on I knew I wanted Harry to believe he was walking toward his death, but would survive."
She is pleased fans worried about her hero's fate before Deathly Hallows was released.
"I was very proud that people thought Harry's death was a genuine possibility. I was very proud, because my story had to make the possibility of death real. I wanted the reader to feel that anyone might die, as in life."
There were deaths that were traumatic to write, she says.
"Fred (Weasley, brother of Harry's friend Ron), Lupin (a former teacher at Hogwarts, the school for wizards and witches that Harry attended) and Tonks (Lupin's wife) really caused me a lot of pain," Rowling says.
"Lupin and Tonks were two who were killed who I had intended to keep alive. … It's like an exchange of hostages, isn't it? And I kept Mr. Weasley (Ron's father) alive. He was slated to die in the very, very original draft of the story."
With the publication of Deathly Hallows, Rowling begins a new chapter in her writing life - a life, she says, that will not include filling in the 19-year gap between Harry's final battle with Voldemort and the epilogue, which revisits Harry and his friends Ron and Hermione as happy adults.
"I truly have no desire to do that," she says, "and I feel it would be an enormous anticlimax. After the arc of the Voldemort story, what could match up?"
That, she says, would require creating a new supervillain. And to revisit Harry's story would be "continuing it for the sake of continuing it. I don't feel that's (another battle of good vs. evil) what happened in Harry's life. I think Harry gained peace. He got what he always wanted, which was a happy family."
