Joanne Rowling, known by her pen name J. K. Rowling, is a British author and philanthropist. She has won numerous accolades for her Harry Potter book series, including general literature prizes, honours in children's literature and speculative fiction awards. The series has garnered multiple British Book Awards, beginning with the Children's Book of the Year in 1997 and 1998 for the first two volumes, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. In 2000 the third novel, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, was nominated for an adult award – the Whitbread Book of the Year – where it competed against a book by a Nobel prize laureate (Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf). The award body gave Rowling the children's prize instead (worth half the