By LJ Staff

"My books are largely about death," is hardly the thing you'd expect to hear from the best selling YA writer in history, but J.K. Rowling says that the death of her mother at age 45 fueled much of her Harry Potter series. Rowling told Britain's Telegraph that the night her mother, Anne, died from multiple sclerosis, she planned to watch a movie but instead began writing what would become the opening of the first Potter adventure. "I know I was writing about Harry Potter at the moment my mother died," she said. The enormity of the loss is stamped in her fiction: the Potter series "opens with the death of Harry's parents. There is Voldemort's obsession with conquering death and his quest for immortality at any price...I so understand why Voldemort wants to conquer death. We're all frightened of it." Although she earlier had said that she wasn't sure of what she'd do post Potter, on a brighter note Rowling revealed to the publication that she has completed an unrelated children's book for readers younger than the average Potter-head, which she dubs "a political fairy story," and she added, "There are also some short stories already written."