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Rowling invites Potter fan
09/06/2005 14:46 - (SA)
Indiana - A northwest Indiana teen who created a website for Harry Potter fans will get a chance to meet the creator of the popular book series.
Emerson Spartz, 18, was sleeping when the phone rang recently at his home in LaPorte, 50 kilometres west of South Bend. He awoke to hear the Scottish voice of author JK Rowling. Rowling, who is known for being private, invited the teen to fly to Scotland at her expense on July 13.
She will grant him an hour-long interview at her home on July 16, the release date for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the sixth book in her series, Spartz told The News-Dispatch of Michigan City.
"At first, I thought it was extremely odd," Emerson said. "I thought, 'Why would she want to talk to me?"'
But Rowling was familiar with Spartz's website, www.mugglenet.com, which she called one of her favourites.
Spartz, who will attend the University of Notre Dame to study business management, created the site in 1999, first calling it Potteritesunited.homestead.com. He later named the site after a category of characters in Rowling's series, the non-magical humans known as muggles.
More than 40 volunteers help Spartz maintain the site, which in November 2002 had about 70 000 to 80 000 hits a day when the film version of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets arrived in theatres.
Now, the site gets about a million hits per day, Spartz said.
- AP
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