Rowling poses ‘Potter’ queries

“Harry Potter” novelist J.K. Rowling says her young hero will survive to the seventh book in her series about the young wizard, but she won’t say whether he would reach adulthood.

Rowling, now at work on the sixth book, teased a group of fans with morsels of information as she gave a reading of “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Sunday.

She encouraged the fans to try to piece together future plots for themselves, and urged them to focus on why Harry’s nemesis, the evil warlock Voldemort, had not 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 added, referring to the headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.