Her mother Anne was half-French and half-Scottish. Rowling was born to Peter James Rowling, a Rolls-Royce aircraft engineer, and Anne Rowling (née Volant), on 31 July 1965 in Yate, Gloucestershire, England, 10 miles (16 km) northeast of Bristol. In a 2012 interview, Rowling noted that she no longer cared that people pronounced her name incorrectly. During the Leveson Inquiry she gave evidence under the name of Joanne Kathleen Rowling.
She calls herself Jo and has said, 'No one ever called me 'Joanne' when I was young, unless they were angry.' Following her marriage, she has sometimes used the name Joanne Murray when conducting personal business. As she had no middle name, she chose K as the second initial of her pen name, from her paternal grandmother Kathleen Ada Bulgen Rowling. Anticipating that the target audience of young boys might not want to read a book written by a woman, her publishers demanded that she use two initials, rather than her full name. Rowling, pronounced like rolling, her name when her first Harry Potter book was published was simply Joanne Rowling. Although she writes under the pen name J.K.
