Harry Potter fortune to help lone parents

In an article for the Sun

tabloid newspaper, Rowling, 34, made no mention of the donation, but described her experience six years ago as a single parent struggling to live on a state benefit of 70 pounds ($101) a week.

"When I went to claim my first week’s income support, I felt as though there was an enormous neon arrow pointing at my head," Rowling wrote in the Sun.

"I know nobody was setting out to make me feel humiliated and worthless, but that was exactly how I felt," she said.

Rowling described how she got married at age 27 and became pregnant with daughter Jessica soon afterwards.

She said the day she gave birth was the best of her life. But her marriage ended some three months later, bringing her hopes for the future crashing to the ground.

"I didn’t expect to become a single mother. There hadn’t ever been a divorce in my family and it never occurred to me that I would be the one to break the winning streak."

She returned to Edinburgh from Portugal, hoping to train as a teacher but found it impossible to escape from the welfare system until friends stepped in and loaned her money to pay for childcare while she started a course.

Just as she began teaching, a publisher accepted her first novel "Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone

", which was written during long days in Edinburgh cafes with the baby asleep in the pram beside her.

The rags-to-riches story has become part of the lore surrounding Rowling, whose books about the young boy who finds out he is a wizard have made best-seller lists around the world and earned her more than 20 million pounds ($29.1 million).

But Rowling is irked by the potrayal of her as a starving artist, struggling to get her vision on paper and says articles about her background are often embellished.

"I write in cafes because I like other people making me coffee. It also makes me sad that nobody turns a hair to see the word’s penniless and single mother together in a sentence. People seem to accept that the two things usually go together.

Rowling said she has never forgotten what it was like to be poor and said she would still be trapped in the cycle if it was not for some generous friends and a publisher who liked Harry Potter.