We can get books by Orson Scott Card, Terry Pratchett, Anne Perry, Robert Ludlum… Western authors who write in English who’ve written twenty plus books and have a sizeable following and are practically guaranteed to sell books. We don’t get new authors or unproven authors – they usually don’t get foreign sales as quickly. Local authors mostly write in Sinhalese and English isn’t as big a market. Let me explain it this way…
In terms of native speakers, something like 80% of the population will learn Sinhalese as their first language, 15% with Tamil as first language, and perhaps 5% will learn English as the first language. Only in the larger centres like Colombo, Kandy, and Galle, will you find a sizeable population of fluent English speakers, and I’m not talking majority of the population here.
If you love reading books (in English), and more importantly, collecting your own library, you would be disappointed at the serious lack of selection available here. Which only goes to demonstrate why I love Fahim so much – he HAS a sizeable collection of books. Granted, collected over decades, but still. It’s going to take me a lot of years to run out.
