The celebrated author says that she may produce “director’s cut” versions of two of her Harry Potter novels, and doesn’t rule out additional books in that world — but without Harry. When it comes to the boy wizard’s story “I’m done,” she tells the BBC in an interview to promote her new novel for adults, The Casual Vacancy. “I just think it would be for the sake of milking it and that’s just not in me.” That includes a Potter prequel or sequel. “I’ve never seen it work well in either literature or film.” Nevertheless, she says that “if I did have a great idea for something else” in the universe she created then “I probably would do it.” She’s also mulling the possibility of tidying up some of her Potter novels that she believes “needed another year” of work. “There’s one towards the beginning and there’s one towards the end, that I definitely felt that about. I had to write on the run and there were times when it was really tough. And I read them, and I think ‘Oh God, maybe I’ll go back and do a director’s cut.’ I don’t know.”

Rowling also reiterated the concerns she raised last year against the possibly illegal tactics that UK tabloid reporters use to violate celebrities’ privacy. “I can’t put an invisibility cloaking device over my house, nor do I wish to,” she told a government inquiry into press behavior created following the hacking and bribery scandals at Rupert Murdoch’s papers including News Of The World. “I hope and pray [the investigation] does change things because I think it’s toxic, what has been allowed to go on.” But she adds that “there will be massive resistance on the part of some aspects of the media.”