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Friday, August 15, 2025

The sky’s the limit for 10-year-old T&T author

by

1221 days ago
20220411

Like many young boys, Ethan Fer­min dreams of one day be­com­ing a pi­lot.

But for now, the soft-spo­ken, con­fi­dent 10-year old from Ari­ma is cel­e­brat­ing his achieve­ment of be­com­ing a first-time pub­lished au­thor in the Unit­ed King­dom. His first book, Trinidad and To­ba­go ABC was launched in the UK in Feb­ru­ary less than two years af­ter fly­ing there with his fam­i­ly in 2020.

The book, aimed at pre-school­ers, cel­e­brates T&T’s her­itage by us­ing every­day items, food, places and ref­er­ences from the is­lands to pro­mote the al­pha­bet. It fol­lows sib­lings Ju­nior and Ayana who in­tro­duce read­ers to words from A to Z — start­ing with Ari­ma and end­ing with “zabo­ca”.

Ethan’s pub­lish­er, Young Lit Stars (YLS), is pro­mot­ing the book as “a fun and easy way for young ones to learn the al­pha­bet.”

YLS says it is the UK’s first pub­lish­ing com­pa­ny ded­i­cat­ed to young Black au­thors and has, to date, pub­lished 38 books writ­ten by chil­dren aged 15 and un­der.

With time on his hands in the pan­dem­ic-dri­ven lock­down, Ethan had al­ready start­ed writ­ing a book when YLS got in touch.

“As much as I like liv­ing here in Eng­land I felt it was im­por­tant to re­mem­ber what it’s like in Trinidad. So I thought of many of the favourite and in­ter­est­ing things that I loved about Trinidad and I start­ed to put them in a book, so I could just look at it and re­mem­ber.”

Those jour­nal en­tries start­ed to take shape as a sto­ry about the pet dog he had left be­hind in Trinidad, tak­ing read­ers on an ex­plo­ration of T&T and its cul­ture as they roam the coun­try to­geth­er. Ethan says he was ini­tial­ly afraid of the fam­i­ly pet but as he spent more time with the dog dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, they be­came al­most in­sep­a­ra­ble.

Ethan’s moth­er, Do­mi­ni Hare­wood, says he was al­ways an avid read­er but she wor­ried that be­ing stuck in­doors dur­ing the pan­dem­ic was go­ing to be tough on him.

“In try­ing to find an av­enue for him to ex­plore his imag­i­na­tion and to not just be stuck on games, I chal­lenged him to write, and he came up with the idea of writ­ing about his dog.” Ethan was al­so good at writ­ing, she says, but didn’t re­al­ly see it as an av­enue to ex­press him­self.

“The re­la­tion­ship with the dog and how that in­spired his writ­ing are def­i­nite­ly pos­i­tives that came out of the pan­dem­ic.”

Want­i­ng to pro­mote her son’s bur­geon­ing tal­ent, Hare­wood reached out to pub­lish­ers on­line and, even­tu­al­ly heard back from YLS. But they had put a mora­to­ri­um on pub­lish­ing new man­u­scripts dur­ing the pan­dem­ic. In­stead, they want­ed some­thing more spe­cif­ic from Ethan – an of­fer to write the third book in their Caribbean De­light Se­ries, fol­low­ing oth­er child-au­thored “ABC” books based on Bar­ba­dos and Ja­maica.

That didn’t faze Ethan, who read­i­ly took on the chal­lenge: “It was like the per­fect thing as I want­ed to write about Trinidad any­way.”

He chose Ju­nior as the name for one of the char­ac­ters in his book in ho­n­our of his late fa­ther, who passed away when he was on­ly four years old. “When I was think­ing of how to tell the sto­ry of T&T, I thought of my dad and the ex­pe­ri­ences I had with him grow­ing up. For ex­am­ple, he first took me to buy dou­bles, which I ab­solute­ly love (D is for dou­bles in the book).”

There is al­so a men­tion of McKen­zie, Ethan’s best friend and class­mate dur­ing his time at the Spe­cial­ist Learn­ing Cen­tre in St Au­gus­tine. Shelly Os­bourne, who re­mem­bers them both from her Stan­dard Two class, is proud that her for­mer pupil is now a pub­lished au­thor.

“Ethan was al­ways good at cre­ative writ­ing. He would think out­side of the box and come up with very imag­i­na­tive sto­ries, but with this book, I like how he has re­flect­ed on the most in­ter­est­ing ex­pe­ri­ences he had grow­ing up in T&T, on the im­pact they have had on his life, and that he has tak­en those with him to a new home abroad.”

Keep­ing alive the mem­o­ries of life back home in T&T is some­thing that dri­ves Ethan and he is now keen to fin­ish and pub­lish his sec­ond book. But he hasn’t giv­en up on his dream of be­ing a pi­lot. “That would al­low me to see more of the world and per­haps write even more sto­ries about oth­er places.”

Most im­por­tant­ly, he hopes it will al­so en­able him to fly back to his beloved T&T more reg­u­lar­ly.

“That will be the best part of the job.”

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