Rowling dispels controversy as she works magic on university audience

Listen to Rowling's speech by clicking on the green audiolink>>>

WHEN it was announced last month that JK Rowling was to give Harvard University's most important address of the year, she was dismissed as a "flash in the pan".

However, any suggestion she was unwelcome was forgotten, as she received a standing ovation lasting one minute and 50 seconds from 15,000 people attending the Ivy League university's graduation ceremony on Thursday.

Undergraduates feared the Harry Potter author would be a letdown after former heavyweight speakers such as Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, former Irish president Mary Robinson, ex-US secretary of state Madeleine Albright and former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan.

Student Adam Goldenberg wrote in the university newspaper that the Harry Potter phenomenon was "a flash in the pan" and branded his creator a "petty pop culture personality".

But Corydon Ireland, a writer for Harvard University Gazette, told The Scotsman yesterday: "I hope any false controversy has settled down about her being unwelcome here. Nothing could be further from the truth. During her remarks, you could hear a pin drop."

Ms Rowling's speech stressed the importance of imagination. She said: "We do not need magic to transform our world." She also spoke about the benefit of failure, recalling the time before her career took off with a string of novels about a boy wizard.

What the author told spellbound students of Harvard:

'HALF my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself and what those closest to me expected of me. I was convinced the only thing I wanted to do was write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view my over-active imagination was an amusing quirk that could never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension.

They had hoped I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English literature. A compromise was reached that, in retrospect, satisfied nobody, and I went to study modern languages. Hardly had my parents' car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the classics corridor.

What I feared most was not poverty, but failure.

I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears my parents had for me, and that I had for myself, had come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter I adored, an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid found-ation on which I rebuilt my life.

THE knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and has been worth more to me than any qualification.

You might think I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. It is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transform-ative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with those whose experiences we have never shared.

Though I was sloping off to write during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working in the research department at Amnesty International's headquarters in London. I open-ed handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes. Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils human-kind will inflict on fellow humans to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares about some of the things I saw, heard and read.

Unlike any other creature, humans can learn and understand without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people's minds, imagine other people's places. Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use it to manipulate or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.

IF YOU choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped transform for the better.

We do not need magic to change the world; we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already – we have the power to imagine better."