FOUR years ago JK Rowling was so shocked by a newspaper photograph of a small boy staring from his caged bed in a Czech care home that her first reaction was to turn the page.
But, haunted by the image of Vasek Knotek, the Harry Potter author went on to spearhead a multi-million-pound campaign to transform his and other children's lives across Eastern Europe.
And at the Edinburgh launch yesterday of her book The Tales of Beedle the Bard Rowling revealed that Vasek has now been freed.
"I'm delighted to say that the little boy is no longer caged at all," she said. "He's surprising his carers every day with what he is managing to achieve."
Sales of the volume of five fairytales, with eight million copies in print worldwide, will help fund the Children's High Level Group (CHLG), a charity Rowling co-founded for vulnerable Eastern European children.
Vasek, who is about nine years old and has autism, was kept in a crib with iron bars topped with chicken wire.
Locked in the cage and with little human contact beyond mealtimes, he developed institutionalised behaviour that went from rocking back and forth to banging his head against the bars.
In the past two months, however, he has been released while receiving one-on-one therapy.
The Raby Social Care Home near Prague, where he and about ten other children are housed with 90 adults, will be one of the first Czech institutions to work with experts funded by CHLG in a pilot project.
Vasek, it is hoped, will be returned to his own family or placed with a specialist foster carer by the end of 2009, said the charity's director, Georgette Mulheir.
If so, Rowling should be able to visit him, Ms Mulheir said. "He doesn't talk very much but he is starting to use words. He is not aggressive at all."
It is thought 10,000 children have been living in similar conditions in the Czech Republic, often housed with mentally handicapped or learning-disabled adults and vulnerable to mistreatment.
The government has made "fantastic progress" and is working with the charity to phase out caged beds and similar methods, Ms Mulheir said.
As well as funding support, Rowling's public advocacy "makes people sit up and take notice," she said. "Her name makes all the difference in the world."
Rowling first read about Vasek when she was pregnant and couldn't stop thinking about "the little boy kept 24 hours a day in a cage", she said.
Inadequate support for parents and medical staff across the former Soviet bloc left countless children in bleak conditions.
It would be an achievement "if we can do this for only ten children", Rowling said. "We are hoping to do it for a million."
The Tales of Beedle the Bard was launched yesterday with a tea party for 200 children followed by a small event at the National Library of Scotland. in Edinburgh. Guests included the author, Ian Rankin, and the Irish actress Evanna Lynch, who plays Luna Lovegood in the Harry Potter films.
The book has a global print run of eight million in 28 languages and is expected to be a Christmas bestseller worldwide.
A surprise twist in the talesThe Tales of Beedle the Bard was first featured as a plot twist in the seventh and last Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
The volume of fairytales played a crucial role in Harry Potter's final struggle to defeat Lord Voldemort, but only one of the five stories, The Tale of the Three Brothers, was featured in the book.
Rowling hand-wrote just six original copies of Beedle as gifts to people who helped make Harry Potter a global success. A seventh hand-written copy was auctioned by the CHLG charity for £1.95 million.
The author told 200 children at yesterday's launch "tea party" in Edinburgh that she had bowed to pressure from fans to publish it.
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The full article contains 712 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
