Er­line An­drews

Amalie Howard wrote her first book at age nine. It was writ­ten out by hand in a copy­book and was about a girl with mag­ic tat­toos.

At 15, she won a Com­mon­wealth es­say com­pe­ti­tion for a sto­ry about a man who played the vi­o­lin as a way to com­mu­ni­cate with his dead daugh­ter, whose soul was trapped in a weep­ing wil­low.

She had a vivid imag­i­na­tion that was nur­tured at home by her mom, a sec­ondary school French teacher, and her dad, a pri­ma­ry school prin­ci­pal.

"My par­ents nev­er sti­fled my cre­ative dri­ve at all," she re­called.

Howard has par­layed that cre­ativ­i­ty in­to a ca­reer as an au­thor, carv­ing out a niche in the in­creas­ing­ly crowd­ed young adult fan­ta­sy genre, which has ex­plod­ed in the last two decades, with the suc­cess of book/movie se­ries Har­ry Pot­ter, Twi­light and The Hunger Games.

Howard is about to re­lease her sixth nov­el and is even in talks to have one of her books made in­to a tele­vi­sion se­ries.

Howard's suc­cess is es­pe­cial­ly im­por­tant to T&T be­cause she was born here 40 years ago as Resh­ma Amalie Go­sine. She mi­grat­ed to study and work, spent time in Boston, New York and France, be­fore set­tling in Col­orado with her Aus­tralian hus­band.

Howard's mom, Nazroon Ram­sey, a re­tired French teacher, said she knew her daugh­ter was spe­cial when at three, the lit­tle girl had a bat­tle of wills when an aunt of­fered her juice in a plas­tic cup when Howard want­ed a glass.

"She said, 'No thank you. I don't want the juice'. That showed me that she had a mind of her own," said Ram­sey.

Howard re­cent­ly re­turned to T&T for the first time in ten years. The trip was a brief va­ca­tion and to cel­e­brate her mom's birth­day, but she took the op­por­tu­ni­ty to hold a book sign­ing at Mo­hammed's Book­store in La Ro­maine, which car­ries her books, make TV and ra­dio ap­pear­ances, and to vis­it her al­ma mater, St Au­gus­tine Girls' High School.

She gave a class­room of wide-eyed teen girls ad­vice on writ­ing and on life.

"Dare to be dif­fer­ent. Be the ex­cep­tion not the rule. Your dif­fer­ences are what's go­ing to make you you," she said.

"Don't be afraid to take chances or try any­thing new be­cause you'll nev­er know if you'll be able to do it or not," she added. "Be­lieve in your­self and you can't fail. Be re­silient."

She was swarmed af­ter­wards by ea­ger stu­dents want­i­ng her to sign books and book­marks and an­swer more ques­tions. Her pres­ence gave hope to those with am­bi­tions to write. "It made me re­alise I can do it," said 13-year-old Am­ba Mo­hammed. "I shouldn't stop writ­ing."

Howard al­ways dreamed of writ­ing. But she de­ferred it in favour of a cor­po­rate ca­reer un­til five years ago. A fan of fan­ta­sy nov­els and the young adult genre–she ad­mires JK Rowl­ing, JRR Tolkien and Anne Rice–she thought she could do bet­ter than Twi­light au­thor Stephe­nie Mey­er.

"My biggest prob­lem with Twi­light was that Bel­la was so weak," she said, re­fer­ring to the se­ries' teen pro­tag­o­nist.

"I want­ed to write about girls that in­spired oth­er girls," she said.

She want­ed to send the mes­sage to young read­ers that "no mat­ter if you're born with a dis­abil­i­ty or oth­er prob­lems you can sur­mount that."

She wrote her first book, Blood­spell, got an agent, who got her pub­lish­ing deals for that and sub­se­quent books.

Blood­spell is about a 17-year-old girl who dis­cov­ers she's a witch and faces a curse. Wa­ter­fell and Ocean­born are a se­ries about a mer­maid hid­ing in the hu­man world and seek­ing to re­claim her lost birthright from en­e­mies. In Al­pha God­dess, the hu­man avatar of the Hin­du god­dess Lak­sh­mi has to fight to save the world from an evil god.

The fear­less­ness of the char­ac­ters is re­flec­tive of Howard her­self.

On her Web site she boasts of ex­ten­sive trav­el, bungee-jump­ing 765 feet in Chi­na, and at­tend­ing a Hal­loween par­ty at the Play­boy Man­sion.

St Au­gus­tine Girls eco­nom­ics teacher Pearl Bal­ga­r­oo re­mem­bers Howard as a "bril­liant stu­dent" with "an in­quir­ing mind."

"She chal­lenged what you had to say. She didn't take any­thing as is," said Bal­ga­r­oo.

Howard hopes her suc­cess can send an­oth­er mes­sage: Race and gen­der shouldn't keep back any au­thor. Nei­ther should be­ing from a small is­land.

"You write a nov­el, if you be­lieve in it enough, you get an agent, they send it to a pub­lish­er and you get pub­lished. You can to­tal­ly do that from here," she said.

"I'm an in­ter­na­tion­al writer. One of my pub­lish­ers is British. That didn't stop them from pub­lish­ing me," she added. "Pub­lish­ers are look­ing for a good sto­ry."

In fact, Howard said, her Trinida­di­an her­itage has helped her work.

"Grow­ing up in a place that is mul­ti-cul­tur­al, mul­ti-eth­nic, mul­ti-re­li­gious is phe­nom­e­nal. It gave me an ap­pre­ci­a­tion for dif­fer­ent cul­tures, dif­fer­ent sto­ries," she said.

"There's so much folk­lore and imag­i­na­tion, rich­ness and di­ver­si­ty," she added.

"It was a huge con­tri­bu­tion."