JK Rowling

The 'Harry Potter' author is celebrating after her daughter Jessica, 29 - who she shares with her first husband, former TV journalist Jorge Arantes - got engaged, according to the Mail on yesterday's Talk of the Town column. Rowling, 55, has two other children - David, 18, and Mackenzie, 16 - with doctor Neil Murray.

The author's marriage to Arantes fell apart shortly after Jessica was born and she has called it a "humiliating" experience. She previously said: "It was my Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee moment. It is the most humiliating thing, actually: you're supposed to have your relationship disaster in your teens, aren't you - and then wise up?"

Rowling left Portugal and moved to Edinburgh, saying: "Edinburgh is beautiful, has good public transport and did have, then, free museums, and I thought, 'I'll have a much better life here on a low income with my daughter.' I could just see that broke single-parenthood here would be easier. "Poverty is the issue. I do say that partly out of my own experience, but I am acutely aware when I talk about single parents being poor that, for me, it was a temporary state and it was always likely to be.

We were never going to be rich if I had been a teacher, but we were never going to be dirt poor. And I had middle-class friends who could lend me a tenner." Rowling has previously explained how she wrote the first 'Harry Potter' book in a cafe while Jessica slept beside her in a pushchair. - Bang Showbiz