J.K. Rowling's lost manuscript is 'hanging in a wardrobe currently'

One woman's private nightmare is another Potterhead's dream

As much as it breaks our hearts, J.K. Rowling’s been making gradual moves away from the Harry Potter universe - going as far as to develop a secret crime novelist alter ego as Robert Galbraith. However it turns out that there’s another post-Potter story that she’s yet to release, mainly because it’s tucked away in her wardrobe.

In an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, the opinionated author was asked if she was going to follow through on previous statements and write a politically-charged children’s story. While Rowling admitted that she saw that dream as more of a ‘fairy tale’, she did reveal that she had dressed up as a lost manuscript for her 50th birthday.

She said, ‘On my 50th - the theme of my 50th birthday, which I held at Halloween, even though that’s not really my birthday, was come as your own private nightmare. And I went as a lost manuscript. And I wrote over a dress most of that book. So that book, I don’t know whether it will ever be published, but it’s hanging in a wardrobe currently.’

Rowling’s no stranger to penning her works on unconventional materials. In fact, she famously scribbled the seeds of Harry Potter on train napkins, proving that great things can come from the humblest beginnings.

While J.K. Rowling has been working on a children's book and her newest instalment in her crime novel series, she’s turned a lot of her attention to her children’s charity Lumos. Named after the spell that casts light in the Hogwarts-universe, it’s dedicated to fighting the institutionalisation of children and keeping families together.

She explained why it was a cause so dear to her heart, saying, 'What drew me in was one child. It was a news report about one child in a newspaper...And the story was about an institution in the Czech Republic where this boy, among many other children with special needs, was being kept, I would say, at least 20 hours out of 24 in a cage-bed, which is exactly as it sounds...And from that, that's how it all began. I was just appalled and horrified.'