Harry Potter Pottermore eBooks will focus on Hogwarts
There’s plenty more story to be told about the world of Harry Potter. J.K. Rowling has proved that this year with long-awaited sequel Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and the run-up to the Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them film, but also with the writing she’s done over the years for Pottermore’s website. This September, some of that writing will be collected in three Pottermore Presents eBooks, along with new, never-before-published pieces.
The theme of these eBooks, unlike the North America-focused Fantastic Beasts, is Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. The books will explore Hogwarts professors both beloved (McGonagall, Lupin) and reviled (Quirrell, Umbridge), in addition to the secrets of the castle itself.
“Hogwarts is the heart, and we’re able to curate around that the backstories for teachers, classmates, and families in that wizarding world,” Anna Rafferty, Pottermore’s director of product, tells EW. “While there is a focus on new parts of the wizarding world, we still love that existing story … We’ve got new writing on really well-loved characters like Minerva McGonagall and Horace Slughorn. In each of those stories, you see those themes being worked out, and you learn more about the characters — their personal lives, their story before Harry Potter, and their story afterwards. That’s really exciting.”
Much of the writing in the new trilogy of eBooks (Short Stories from Hogwarts: Power, Politics and Pesky Poltergeists; Short Stories from Hogwarts: Heroism, Hardship and Dangerous Hobbies; and Hogwarts: An Incomplete and Unreliable Guide) has been previously published on Pottermore’s website, but there will also be new writing from Rowling. Rafferty says Pottermore wanted to make sure that stories were available even to Harry Potter fans who don’t check the website regularly.
“We want to be able to allow those who might prefer reading an eBook as well as those reading on a website to have access to these useful vignettes and entries on J.K. Rowling’s wizarding world, because she’s written them for those readers,” Rafferty says. “We had such a rich body of work to clip and connect that it was the theming and the curation of it as well as the reading that was such a joy putting it together. I really hope that fans enjoy taking the journey back to Hogwarts.”
The first three Pottermore Presents eBooks will be available on Pottermore’s website, plus other digital book retailers, starting Sep. 6. Rafferty says there are currently no concrete plans for more in the future, but there are certainly still corners of the Wizarding World left to explore.