JK Rowling reveals her rags to riches story

London, Sept 22 : Harry Potter creator JK Rowling might have reached great heights of success but her new lifestyle is a far cry from the world she lived in when she first dreamt up the boy wizard.

In 1990, Rowling's world was rocked when her mother died, aged 45, after a 10-year battle with multiple sclerosis.

She left the UK to teach English in Portugal where she met her first husband, the Portuguese journalist Jorges Arantes, but she continued to write.

In 1993, Rowling gave birth to their daughter Jessica but she split from her hubby soon afterwards and moved to Edinburgh to be near her sister.

She initially intended to start teaching again but dropped the idea because she says she would never have finished the book.

"I knew that full-time teaching, with all the marking and lesson planning, let alone a small daughter to care for single-handedly, would leave me with absolutely no spare time at all," BBC quoted her, as saying.

Living off welfare payments in 'grotty and depressing' government housing, Rowling developed Harry Potter's world as a means of escape.

The author would wander around the town pushing Jessica in a pram until her bay fell asleep, giving her mother the chance to head for a coffee shop to write.

The owners of her favourite cafe, Nicolson's, would let her stay all day - Jessica sleeping at her side - as she wrote out the stories in longhand, having ordered only a glass of water and an espresso.

A Scottish Arts Council grant helped her to pay for a typewriter and she hammered out the manuscript, which would eventually convince the publisher Bloomsbury that Potter could be a hit.

"I had to type the whole thing out myself. Sometimes I actually hated the book, even while I loved it," Rowling says on her official website.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone eventually hit the UK shelves in 1997 and then there was no looking back.

ANI