NEW YORK: Celebrated author JK Rowling testified on Monday that the author of an encyclopaedia based on her blockbuster “Harry Potter” series of children’s books was guilty of “wholesale theft,” and asked a US court to block publication of the work.

“This book constitutes a wholesale theft of 17 years of hard work,” said Rowling in a Manhattan District Court, on the first day of a trial that was expected to last most of the week.

“It was all my life, apart from my children,” she said, saying that she felt “extremely shocked” upon learning about the derivative “Harry Potter Lexicon” by Steve Vander Ark.

“I did feel a degree of betrayal,” about the book.

Rowling, and Warner Brothers, the Hollywood film studio that has translated her hit book series to the big screen, accused the lexicon’s publisher of undermining the integrity of her work.

But Anthony Falzone, the attorney representing the book’s publisher, countered that the encyclopaedia, meant to be a companion to the books or the films, not only does not diminish the original novels, but actually enhances the enjoyment of them.

“If this book is suppressed, the public will lose a useful reference guide,” Falzone said.

“The question here is to decide whether Mrs Rowling has the power to make the Lexicon disappear,” he said, asserting that the book “is not a plausible substitute to any of the Harry Potter novels.” Rowling however said that she had planned her own reference guide cataloguing the characters and events in her highly popular book series, which has sold almost 350 million copies around the world in some 65 languages.

She said she expected that her own Harry Potter encyclopaedia, done “properly” would take her about “two to three years” while she slammed the lexicon as an artless rip-off.

“The lexicon is not a quality book,” she said.—AFP