So I'm not the best private detective on the farms, but I've been looking for the interview in question and can't find it. Which is weird, because it's supposed to be a BBC radio 4 program and they obsessively archive everything, digitally and materially. They learned from the lost doctor who tapes.
The source for the quote according to wikipedia is a 2000 article from The Sunday Herald by journalist Sarah-Kate Templeton, archived on
accioquote:
Templeton, Sarah-Kate. "How Lolita inspired Harry Potter," The Sunday Herald, 21 May 2000
The famously reclusive millionaire writer JK Rowling has revealed that even as a child she hid away from the world, burying herself in books and daydreams. She describes herself as a "squat, bespectacled child" and admits that she was as obsessed with Jane Austen as many of her readers are with her tales of Harry Potter. But while Rowling's fans might whizz through Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban just to start reading it all over again, Rowling ploughed through Austen's Emma at "least 20 times". But, most surprisingly, the single-mother chose Vladimir Nabakov's Lolita, the controversial tale of a paedophile's love for a 12-year-old girl whose life he ruins through abuse, as one of her favourite novels. Speaking in a rare interview for a new Radio 4 series about famous people's favourite books, she confides: "There are two books whose final lines make me cry without fail, irrespective of how many times I read them, and one is Lolita. There is so much I could say about this book. "There just isn't enough time to discuss how a plot that could have been the most worthless pornography becomes, in Nabakov's hands, a great and tragic love story, and I could exhaust my reservoir of superlatives trying to describe the quality of the writing." Despite her recent reclusive behaviour, the author discloses that, all her life, she has been enchanted by the idea of large families. She says one of the motivations behind her Harry Potter books was the ability to create a big family for herself. She says: "I have always been drawn to the idea of large families, even as a child The Harry Potter books were my chance to create my own, ideal big family, and my hero is never happier than when holidaying with the seven Wesleys."
And in a poem which the author dedicates to her six-year-old daughter Jessica, the author cherishes laughter and friendship above all else.
Joanne Rowling has become increasingly reclusive since she became Britain's third richest woman and a celebrated publishing phenomenon. Neighbours have told how the world famous author, who, up until earlier this year lived in a two-bedroom flat in one of Edinburgh's less affluent areas, refused to say hello to people living next door.
Others have claimed she has become so obsessive about her privacy that she has screamed at people who have approached her for an autograph.
It's clearly a slam piece on Rowling anyway, because it finishes characterising her as a cold rude bitch. But also, the Sunday Herald was disbanded as a separate paper in 2018 and folded into the Herald and the National as a sunday edition. It's own website is gone, but the Herald has online archives - it comes back with
124 articles mentioning JK Rowling for the year 2000, and none of them are this article.
The Sunday Herald started Feb 1999, so would have been operating about a year when the article was published. The Sunday Herald basically existed to promote scottish independence, which the Herald and National still do, and Rowling has openly always been against Scottish independence - in 2014 she donated 1 mil to the 'better together' campaign and also has made comments about how independence campaigners were like death eaters, making claims about purity of lineage and blood and soil rhetoric.
I also found that Sarah-Kate Templeton left the Sunday Herald in 2004, and the article specifically mentions she was working as the Health Editor when she left. She went on to the Times, and if you google her recent output it is all health related so she's clearly maintained that focus since then - while she could have just not specialised on a topic yet in 2000, it's pretty weird that someone with a specific health focus four years later (and obvious ambition) would be writing weird derogatory shit before that, especially when it's not possible to find the original article.
BBC radio programmes are archived at BBC Sounds online, and the only interview they have for 2000 for JKR is going on desert island discs, which is a programme where you pick what you would take to a desert island with you; her book choice is the SAS survival guide, not Lolita. She did one other interview in August 1999 about Philosopher's Stone itself, and it's half hour long so I'm not going to listen in case she maybe says this about Nabokov, but neither of them match the series about famous people's favourite books anyway.
There's meant to be a transcript
here for the DID interview that doesn't mention Lolita, from an Indian forum. (DID is 45 minutes so I'm not listening to that either). Weirdly, this quote seems to have mainly circulated through a JKR's favourite books listicle article that was first put on Business Insider India and then also reposted by the main Business Insider site.
