Thirangie Jayatilake, Educational Arm Assistant, reporting from Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka’s small publishing industry is limited to few publishers, but four book lovers have launched their own press to fill the gap. Tambapanni Academic Publishers, an academic publishing house named for the first Sinhalese kingdom in Sri Lanka, will likewise be the first of its kind in the country. Rooted in a “common belief in the power of books to inspire and stimulate debate about ideas in Sri Lanka and beyond,” the Colombo-based press will specialize in humanities and social science books, published after a thorough editorial process and peer review.

Helmed by chair Nira Wickramasinghe, a professor of modern South Asian studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands, the editorial committee includes scholars of South Asia from around the world, including Vilasnee Tampoe Hautin, Ravi Kumar, Michael Laffan, Anoma Pieris, and Sujit Sivasundaram. TAP will publish original books and reprint relevant global scholarship in English, Sinhala, and later, Tamil. The catalogue already features Ronit Ricci’s Banishment and Belonging: Exile and Diaspora in Sarandib, Lanka and Ceylon, originally published by Cambridge University Press in 2019, and Wickramasinghe’s Slave in a Palanquin: Colonial Servitude and Resistance in Sri Lanka, first published by Columbia University Press in 2020.

The group will focus on works relevant to Sri Lanka and South Asia, and although academic in nature, the books will also be suitable for general interest: “TAP has a dual mandate in keeping with its location in the global South: it is deeply committed to answering the need of readers in Sri Lanka for scholarly works of excellence at an affordable price, and it is dedicated to hands-on working with talented new authors, providing them with a gateway to global recognition.” (Learn more about TAP’s submission guidelines.)

Originally appears in https://www.asymptotejournal.com/blog/2021/07/30/weekly-dispatches-from-the-front-lines-of-world-literature-82/