NEW YORK, May 18 — JK Rowling said that she found Donald Trump’s rhetoric distasteful, but defended his right to “be offensive and bigoted.”

The Harry Potter author made her sentiments known in New York yesterday, where she received an award from the free speech organisation Pen.

According to the UK’s Telegraph newspaper, she said that she would not support a ban on him entering Britain.

“If you seek the removal of freedoms from an opponent simply on the grounds that they have offended you, you have crossed a line to stand alongside tyrants who imprison, torture and kill on exactly the same justifications,” she was quoted as saying.

Rowling said that while she finds almost everything that Mr Trump says “objectionable”, he still has her full support to come to the UK and “be offensive and bigoted there”, because she doesn’t believe that silencing him was a solution.

The Telegraph quoted her as saying: “Unless we take that absolute position without caveats or apologies we have set foot upon a road with only one destination.

“If my offended feelings can justify a travel ban on Donald Trump, I have no moral grounds on which to argue that those offended by feminism, or the fight for transgender rights, or universal suffrage, should not oppress campaigners for those causes.”

The “fierce opponent of censorship” also warned that intolerance was a growing threat.

“I worry that we may be in danger of allowing their erosion through sheer complacency,” she said.

"The tides of populism and nationalism currently sweeping many developed countries have been accompanied by demands that unwelcome and inconvenient voices be removed from public discourse.

"It seems that unless a commentator or a television channel or a newspaper reflects exactly the complainant’s world view it must be guilty of bias or corruption.”

The 50-year-old author’s dislike of Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for the US presidency, is well known.

For example, in December, when he was being compared to Voldemort, she tweeted: “How horrible. Voldemort was nowhere near that bad.”