Rowling Studies The Hogwarts Professor Podcast

(Credit: Neil Wilder, Edinburgh 1999, now in National Portrait Galley) Solomon Schmidt, author of A Pen to Change the World: The Life of J. K. Rowling ( Skyhorse, June 2026), sat down with us this week to discuss what moved him to write a Rowling biography at the height of her radioactivity as a supposed “transphobe” and the obstacles that Rowling, Inc., puts in the way of unauthorized biographers...

‘Fiona F’ is a Hogwarts Professor subscriber in Adelaide, Australia, the truly down under capitol of the South Pacific island-continent. She works as an environmental scientist on the days she isn’t combing through the Cormoran Strike novels of Rowling-Galbraith in search of answers to the over-arching mysteries of that series. The Hogwarts Professor Talking Heads duo invited her to a discussion o...

Last week Ed Shardlow posted his thoughts about The Hallmarked Man being written in playful but meaningful parallel with Rowling’s “political fairy tale,” ‘ The Hallmarked Man Meets The Ickabog. ’ Nick Jeffery and John Granger called him up both to congratulate him on Arsenal winning the Premier League Cup — Go, Gunners! — and to learn as much as they could about the parallels he noted. After ackn...

In yesterday’s Hallmarked Man Notes: The Christmas Charm Bracelet Decoded, Tod Jameson and the Ectopic Pregnancy, and Venetian Blinds , Ed Shardlow explained three sub-texts within Strike 8 that, though invisible on first and second reading, pop up during structural analysis and in light of other Rowling-Galbraith notes. * The Christmas gift charm bracelet that Strike gives to Robin, for example,...

Nick Jeffery and John Granger sat down last weekend to discuss John’s post, The Literary Alchemy of Hallmarked Man: What Do the Structural Models Tell Us? They’d talked about this subject briefly before John had written it up and he came to rather different conclusions in the process of writing and preparing slides for the post, all of which are rolled out in this inquisition. The questions Nick a...

Nick Jeffery and John Granger sat down to discuss four Hogwarts Professor posts. Here are links to those posts with an excerpt from each and the most relevant urls embedded in them. Enjoy! What is a Squib, Really? And Where Would Rowling Have Met the Word? (John Granger, 27 April 2026) I confess that I assumed the word for barely magical witches and wizards born into magical families in J. K. Rowl...

Golden Threads Last July, Nick Jeffery and I put together a month long review of Rowling’s work in celebration of her 60th birthday , a Kanreki party. Every day we posted conversations about each of Rowling’s works with Nick discussing a ‘Lake’ point, something biographical or bibliographical, and me talking about a ‘Shed’ quality of the work, the author’s traditional tools, artistry, and meaning....

[ Apologies but the recording is quite poor at the start, but improves. Please bear with it - Nick ] John Granger shared privately with Nick Jeffery that he thought it would be a good idea to read C. S. Lewis’ Till We Have Faces, a re-telling of the Cupid and Psyche myth, to get a better grip on Rowling-Galbraith’s re-imagining of the same myth in her Cormoran Strike series. Nick, as is his wont,...

This is the second of a series of posts about the literary alchemy of J. K. Rowling, a discussion jumpstarted by a post by ‘Iris’ at a Strike fan website, an article that championed a Jungian perspective on this subject. The first post in this series, Literary Alchemy – A Primer for Those Interested in J. K. Rowling’s Artistry , both explained what the ‘Iris’ post asserted and reviewed much of the...

Nick Jeffery and John Granger met up last Sunday — St David’s Day in Wales and the Sunday of the Triumph of Orthodoxy — to talk about John’s first Hallmarked Man names post, ‘ The Allegorical Cryptonyms of The Hallmarked Man, Part One: Ten Cratylic Character Names and their Embedded Meanings .’ In addition to reviewing the high points of that post, Nick offered his insights about the first names J...

Nick Jeffery read Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book, a Victorian epic poem about a murder mystery in 17th Century Italy, to test a theory. John Granger’s best guess after surveying the chapter headings of Hallmarked Man last September was that, of all 77 sources for the 139 epigraphs in Strike8 , Browning’s poem was the most likely to hold a secret message or special meaning inside it. John...

Last November Nick and John introduced Dimitra Fimi, the magnificent maven of Tolkien Studies and Professor of Fantasy and Children's Literature at the University of Glasgow, to students of J. K. Rowling’s work. In that discussion, ‘ Reading Rowling as Myth Maker and Myth Re-Writer: A Conversation with Dr Dimitra Fimi, ’ she shared her thoughts about Rowling’s creative use of mythology in Harry Po...

Happy Valentine’s Day! Mrs Murray met the UK StrikeFans.com contingent and Badly WiredLamp (“and friends”) on Thursday to talk about the Cormoran Strike novels. Yesterday, Friday the 13th, Rowling tweeted about the secret she had told them — the title of Strike9 : Nick Jeffery found the most likely source of the title Sleep Tight, Evangeline , assuming it is not an anagram, in six minutes: BadlyWi...

Elizabeth Baird Hardy, Deputy Headmistress of Hogwarts Professor, the genius behind AppalachianInkling.com , Hunger Games expert, and author of Milton, Spenser and the Chronicles of Narnia: Literary Sources for the C.S. Lewis Novels , joined Nick and John to discuss the Charm Bracelet that J. K. Rowling posted on her Twixter home page as a Christmas gift to her readers. She said that that the thir...

On 23 December last year, Rowling changed her Twixter home page header and cameo with this tweeted explanation : The Charm Bracelet header features thirteen charms on nine links: Rowling tweeted an addendum about the Psalter and Jack in the Box charms: Nick Jeffery dropped an explanatory post two days later at the Hogwarts Professor weblog: J. K. Rowling Drops All the Strike 9 Clues for Christmas!...

Running Grave, b ook Seven of the ten novel Cormoran Strike murder mystery series by Joanne Murray (‘J. K. Rowling’) writing as ‘Robert Galbraith,’ is what the author described as her “cult novel.” The cult in question is the Universal Humanitarian Church led by Jonathan Wace; the Strike-Ellacott Agency is hired by a father to rescue his youngest son who has disappeared into the UHC’s Chapman Farm...

Nick is joined by John Granger and special guest star Guido in their temporary headquarters as they await the move to Granger Towers. We discuss the revelation that J. K. Rowling has an inherited blood clotting disorder, and speculate that this could be von Willebrand Disease, and discuss what this could mean for a Golden Thread that John first explored more than five years ago. Nick surveys the i...

Welcome to the Hogwarts Professor New Year’s Celebration! John and Nick look back to a packed 2025, as John looks forward to big changes in 2026. From the marathon Kanreki celebration in July to the joys of sharing The Hallmarked Man with friends around the world and plans for The Hogwarts Professor in 2026. John Granger, Nick Jeffery and the HogPro faculty wish you and your families a happy, heal...

Merry Christmas! In between looking at houses to rent and packing up the Granger house in Oklahoma City, Nick and John put together this yuletide conversation about perhaps the most neglected of Rowling’s influences, Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle . John was a reluctant reader, but, while listening to the audio book, reading the Gutenberg.com file on his computer, and digging the codex out of...

John Granger Attempts to Convince Nick (and You!) That The Hallmarked Man will be Considered the Best of the Series. We review our take-away impressions from our initial reading of The Hallmarked Man. Although we enjoyed it, especially John’s incredible prediction of Robin’s ectopic pregnancy, neither of us came away thinking this was the finest book in the series. For Nick, this was a surprise, a...

John Granger rarely listens to audio adaptations of books unless he’s on a long drive, though he admits they have played an important part in his life as a reader. Nick Jeffery listens to audio books everyday and often for hours at a time; he credits the medium for his mid-life rebirth as a reader (re-reader!). Zossima Granger, writer in residence at ProtagonistBook.com ( Give the gift of an unfor...

John Granger in September 2022, weeks after the publication of Ink Black Heart , tackled the tangle of 108 poetic epigraphs in Strike 6 from twenty-two Anglo-American Victorian women poets in search of a common theme, of a prevalent meaning, or, the Holy Grail, a work among the many works that acted to Heart as Rosmersholm did to Lethal White and Faerie Queene did to Troubled Blood . This effort i...

The Hogwarts Professor comment threads have been jumping so Nick Jeffery and John Granger decided to dedicate a conversation to a review of the Greatest Hits in the last week (to do a complete review yourself, click on ‘Activity’ in the left margin of the Hogwarts Professor Substack home page). After their reviewing the remarkably global and growing audience of Rowling Readers — 36 countries, 46 s...

Dimitra Fimi is Professor of Fantasy and Children’s Literature at the University of Glasgow and Co-Director of the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic . Her Tolkien, Race and Cultural History won the Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Inklings Studies and she co-edited the critical edition of A Secret Vice: Tolkien on Invented Languages which won the Tolkien Society Award for Best Book. Her Celtic...

Nick Jeffery and John Granger sat down today to talk about the wonderful comment threads beneath their Hallmarked Man posts since publication day. They see every comment on every thread and realized no one else was seeing the brilliant theories and ideas from the Hogwarts Professor community. John was tasked with reviewing every comment post publication comment thread to identify the best offering...