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And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable.

It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all ? in which case, you fail by default.

Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations.

Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way.

I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above the price of rubies.

The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive.

You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity.

Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more than any qualification I ever earned.

So given a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement.

Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two.

Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone's total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.

Now you might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so.

Though I personally will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense.

Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation.

In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books.

This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs.

Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working at the African research department at Amnesty International's headquarters in London.

There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them.

I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends.

I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries.

I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.

Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to speak against their governments.

Visitors to our offices included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had left behind.

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