Harry Potter will survive until at least 7th book

Harry Potter will survive to the seventh book of J.K. Rowling's series about the young wizard, but the author won't say whether Harry will reach adulthood.

"He will survive to book seven, mainly because I don't want to be strangled by you lot," she told a group of fans Sunday at the Edinburgh (Scotland) International Book Festival. "But I don't want to say whether he grows any older than that."

Rowling gave a reading of "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" at the festival. More than 500 people had tickets to see her read from the fifth book. She's now working on the sixth book, "Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince."

She encouraged fans to try to piece together future plots and also urged them to focus on why Harry's nemesis, the evil warlock Voldemort, hadn't been killed.

"There are two questions I don't think I've ever been asked and that I should have been asked, if you know what I mean," Rowling said.

She told the gathering they should be asking themselves not "why did Harry live" but "why didn't Voldemort die?"

The second question they should think about is: "Why didn't Dumbledore kill, or try to kill, Voldemort?" she said, referring to the headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.