Hey there! I’m Fahim Farook 🙂
I’ve loved stories (and reading) for as long as I can remember. In fact, my parents have anecdotes about how I’d monopolize the conversations of any visitors as a child and how I wouldn’t let them leave till they’d told me at least one story.
Being from Sri Lanka, my first language was Sinhalese. And I had exhausted all the books in the local library by the time I was around 8 or 9 years old. I read a lot of the classics that were translated to Sinhala — Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Charles Dickens, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Wilkie Collins, R. L. Stevenson etc. But one of my earliest favourites in terms of genre was science fiction. But science fiction books in Sinhala were hard to find.
So, by the time I was around 9, having exhausted the local public library contents in terms of Sinhala books, I started moving to the English section. Initially, I started with Enid Blyton — English was taught as a second language in school but it wasn’t something that I used that much till I started reading.
But switching to English opened up a whole new universe!
I could now read not only books in English, but also a wider range of translations ranging from French to Russian to probably a bunch of other countries around the globe.
In time, I came to appreciate the writing of many authors including (but not limited to) Terry Pratchett, Charles Dickens, Alexandre Dumas, Ursula LeGuin, Lois McMaster Bujold, Stanley G Weinbaum, Robert Heinlein, and so many others.
But all that time, from the time I first started reading, one of my ambitions was to write a book myself and bring others the kind of pleasure that I’d been given so often. But I didn’t actually do that till about 20 years ago. And then I put the book aside and got going on other things. (Ask me if you like and I’ll probably tell you the full story … but won’t bore you with the details now.)
And while I’ve started work on several novels since I finished my first one, I never finished them. But I’m working on a novel at the moment that I’m confident that I’ll finish and I also hope to write a few more after that, God willing.
I’ve worked as a programmer/app developer, TV producer, newspaper columnist, editor of a tech/gadget magazine, and a few other fun things besides. After having left Sri Lanka about 15 years ago, my wife and I currently live in Canada, but we have lived in a bunch of other countries such as New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, UAE, France, Spain, Qatar, Portugal etc. in between.
Welcome to my site and I hope you find something of interest to read here! And if you do, please drop me a line and let me know — there’s nothing I’d enjoy more 🙂
