Amanda was born in Hong Kong of British parents and survived both a convent boarding school and subsequent incarceration at a Jesuit boys’ school. She teaches presentation skills to authors and conducts workshops on dramatic form for children and is also now a successful author, actress and broadcaster. She has lived all over the world and now resides in London.

Amanda Lees on writing Kumari:

I got the idea for KUMARI a short while after my mother died. I knew at once it would be the perfect way to celebrate an extraordinary life. My mother and father were both great adventurers and I wanted to encapsulate that spirit in this trilogy. I wanted the KUMARI books to be the kind of books I loved to read as a child. The sort of book that opened up another world of possibilities - that held a mirror up and let it be the gateway to a wondrous land.

My parents met in Sarawak, on the island of Borneo, where my mother had set up and run a jungle hospital. They soon decamped to Hong Kong where my sisters and I were born. My father, a former Gurkha officer who had spent many years in India and Nepal, founded a business importing his two great loves, cigars and champagne. An eccentric academic, he was, sadly, not a great businessman as my mother was to find out.

My mother, by contrast a pragmatic Glaswegian, had to call upon all her considerable reserves of strength when my father died suddenly of misdiagnosed peritonitis. I was three years old at the time. It was the event that would shape my whole life. According to my Mum, we were left with absolutely nothing, except my dad’s whisky bill for the month. With very little time to mourn, Mum simply had to work. We moved into the hospital where she was nursing and where she eventually rose to become matron.

Always a bookish child, I became even more so when sent off to a convent boarding school at the age of ten. England felt cold, grey and lonely. I missed the sounds, smells and colours of the Far East as well as the freedom I had now lost. Up until then, my mother had taken a long leave every four years to travel with us around the world. Like a line of small ducks, we would follow her on to aeroplanes, a bag in each hand. She showed us the temples of Japan and the Golden Gate Bridge in the fog, the teeming streets of Delhi, and the Rockies at dawn.

I learned early on that the world is a much stranger and more magical place than many of us imagine. Steeped in the rich heritage of the East, my imagination gobbled it all up. Under the covers at night in my dormitory, torch in hand, I kept feeding that imagination. I loved to read of incredible adventures and lives lived on a grand scale.

It was my childhood sense of magic - of possibility - that I wanted to leap from the pages of the KUMARI series. I firmly endorse the notion that faith can move mountains. Not necessarily religious faith, but belief in oneself.

Throughout the series, Kumari learns and grows so much. Her ultimate lesson is one I learned from my Mum: anything is possible. Making it happen is up to you. That is what magic is all about.

The first part of the Kumari trilogy, Kumari:Goddess of Gotham, will be published by Piccadilly Press on 30 August 2007. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.