Harry Potter her publishers to adopt a more gender-neutral pen name in order to appeal to the male members of this age group, fearing that they would not be interested in reading a novel they knew to be written by a woman. She elected to use J. K. Rowling (Joanne Kathleen Rowling), using her grandmother's name as her second name because she has no middle name. "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" was published by Bloomsbury, the publisher of all "Harry Potter" books in the United Kingdom, on 26 June 1997. It was released in the United States on 1 September 1998
J. K. Rowling Smarties Prize. In December 1999, the third novel, "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban", won the Smarties Prize, making Rowling the first person to win the award three times running. She later withdrew the fourth "Harry Potter" novel from contention to allow other books a fair chance. In January 2000, "Prisoner of Azkaban" won the inaugural Whitbread Children's Book of the Year award, though it lost the Book of the Year prize to Seamus Heaney's translation of "Beowulf". The fourth book, "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire", was released simultaneously in the UK and the US on 8