The Prince Without Sorrow by Maithree Wijesekara: What Aussie dentist wrote in lockdown inspired a five-way bidding war

Visiting the dentist in Melbourne soon? You might just find yourself with a bestselling author poking around in your mouth.

Maithree Wijesekara was in her fourth year of dental school when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, sending Australia into lockdown and putting her final placements on hold.

Stuck at home with more free time than she’d had in years, she dipped back into her childhood hobby of writing with no aspirations of ever getting published.

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Last month, her debut novel The Prince Without Sorrow hit shelves and became a No.1 Sunday Times Bestseller almost instantly.

“It’s surreal,” Wijesekara tells 9honey after a string of launch events and book signings.

“I didn’t really think about writing as a career, you know, because…” she says, gesturing to herself, “…brown.”

Growing up Australian-Sri Lankan, Wijesekara’s parents were adamant she go into a stable profession. A career as an author simply wasn’t on the table.

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In fact, her mum and dad were convinced she was being set up the first time a literary agent emailed asking to read her manuscript.

“My parents thought I was being scammed. They were like, ‘Are they trying to steal your work?'” she laughs.

Wijesekara started writing The Prince Without Sorrow while in lockdown in 2021 and finished her first draft in about four months, surprising even herself with how quickly the story came together.

“It was that lightning in a bottle sort of moment,” she says.

Even when classes resumed and she graduated with a Masters in Dentistry, she kept tinkering with the manuscript until a podcast inspired her to try to get it published.

Listening to 88 Cups of Tea, a creative writing podcast, taught her about the industry and querying process and she figured there was no harm in giving it a crack.

Countless rejection emails later, she wasn’t feeling quite so optimistic.

“It was about a year and a half of rejections,” Wijesekara admits with a self-deprecating chuckle.

Fortunately she was working full-time as a dentist, so she could afford to keep trying at getting published on the side.

In September 2022, her persistence paid off when an email from a literary agent in the UK landed in her inbox. They wanted to read the full manuscript.

Despite Wijesekara’s parents fears that she was being scammed, she replied.

Within a few weeks, Madeleine Milburn Literary, TV and Film Agency had offered to represent her and by early 2023, the agency was pitching The Prince Without Sorrow to editors around the world.

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Wijesekara settled in for what she expected to be another long, possibly disappointing journey.

Instead, she landed at the centre of a five-way auction as some of the biggest publishing houses on the planet bid for the rights to her debut novel and two sequels.

The three highest bidders then got to pitch their editorial vision to Wijesekara, who ultimately signed with Harper Voyager UK.

“I was very lucky. It’s unreal,” she says of the moment the deal was made.

Two years later, The Prince Without Sorrow hit shelves and Wijesekara joined a small but growing cohort of South Asian authors making their mark on Australian publishing.

Less than 10 percent of people working in the Australian publishing industry have an Asian cultural identity despite making up more than 17 per cent of national population, and South Asian authors have been historically underrepresented in publishing.

”It’s an honour. At the same time sometimes you do feel pressure,” Wijesekara says.

“Just being South Asian and being able to exist in this space it’s great to be in a position where other people can then perceive you and then think, ‘I can do it too.'”

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Not only does Wijesekara symbolise the changing face of who can get published, her novel reflects the demand for more diverse stories in the fantasy genre, which has been dominated by Euro-centric narratives for decades.

Unlike the countless fantasy epics set in some version of medieval Europe, The Prince Without Sorrow was inspired by the Mauryan Empire of ancient India and one of its rulers, Emperor Ashoka.

A notable figure in Buddhist history, Ashoka started his reign as a cruel and “bloodthirsty” man only to do a complete 180 and renounce violence later in life.

Wijesekara grew up on stories about him but always wondered how he would have been remembered if his transformation had gone in the opposite direction: from pacifism to violence.

The Prince Without Sorrow and its sequels aim to answer that question, blending history, myth and a very healthy dose of fantasy for a uniquely South Asian story.

She’s hopeful that seeing the book on shelves will inspire other young people from similar backgrounds to pursue their dreams writing, even if their parents have different ambitions for them.

“My parents now tell their friends with younger kids, ‘let your kid do whatever they want’. I like that I’ve sort of changed how they think,” she says, then laughs.

“Instead of, ‘do something stable,’ they’re more like, ‘just let your daughters figure out what they want to do’. That’s a nice change.”

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That said, Wijesekara’s glad she had dentistry to fall back on and still works part-time as a dentist, though she’s taken some time off to work on her next novel.

Being an author isn’t always the most stable, lucrative career and she encourages any young Aussies with aspirations of getting published not to quit their day jobs just two write full-time in a cost of living crisis.

As for what fans can expect from her next two books, Wijesekara warns that a happy ending probably isn’t on the cards.

“I’m a dentist, I’m not here to make you happy.”

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