Rowling handwritten Potter pages to go on display at festival

A LITTLE bit of literary magic is coming to a book festival this week as handwritten pages by Harry Potter author JK Rowling go on display.

The original, signed manuscripts, originally written as part of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, will be on show during the Wigtown Book Festival, which starts tomorrow.

The Ballard of Nearly Headless Nick - a ghost who haunts Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry - was eventually edited out of the second book in the series before publication.

But fans of the stories, which Rowling started writing as a single mother living in Edinburgh, will be able to read the framed pages displayed at ReadingLasses bookshop in Wigtown.

The shop, owned by Gerrie and Susan Douglas-Scott, and Bex Woodsford, focuses on books written by and about women. "We're very exciting that this bit of Harry Potter is coming home to Scotland for ten days," Gerrie Douglas-Scott said.

The manuscripts were originally donated by Rowling to the Scottish Language Dictionaries in 2005 to help fund a new Scottish language dictionary. They are now in the hands of Ilyas Khan, a book collector and publisher of Asia Literary Review.

The manuscripts have not previously been displayed in public. The exhibition was said to be a one-off and the pages will not be going on a world tour.

Khan said: "The Asia Literary Review has supported a number of literary festivals, but I must say that I am particularly pleased to see us in Wigtown."

The Wigtown Book Festival, which brings in more than 500,000 a year to the local economy, runs until 2 October.