Life and Work of Khun Srun

Khun Srun was a vital Cambodian writer. He was conceived in the village of Roveang, Samrong district, Takeo province, in a poor Chinese Cambodian family. When he was eight, his father died and he and his kin were raised by his mother, a small shopkeeper, and a dedicated Buddhist. He started his tutoring during the country's first years of independence, when the ways to advanced education and professionalization were crawling open to all Cambodians, paying little mind to their social and economic class.

A brilliant student, he studied Khmer writing and psychology at the university in Phnom Penh, becoming widely read in the sciences, mathematics, and European literature (Pop flock, n.d.). In the midst of the turmoil of the 1960s, he filled in as a teacher of mathematics and a journalist while writing fiction and poetry. He also worked as a member of the textbook editorial committee at the Ministry of Education. In under four years, he published three accumulation of poems, short stories, and philosophical tales; two collections of personal short stories, The Last Residence and The Accused; and a final volume of poems, For a Woman. He was influenced by both existentialism and Cambodian Buddhism (Pop flock, n.d.). In 1971, he was detained by the right-wing Lon Nol government for declining to work together, but still refused to align himself with the extreme left. Khun’s last novel, The Accused that published in 1973, is described by an author detained by Cambodia's military government. The Accused asserts that he is not a person of politics or even a man of conviction, simply an observer and a writer. An admirer of writer needs to escape the nation and be a piece of the more extensive world; yet he needs, likewise, to have the mettle to hazard his life for his principles (Pop flock, n.d.).

Shortly after The Accused was published, Khun left Phnom Penh and joined the Khmer Rouge. He was only 28, and his life as a writer was finished. After the Khmer Rouge took power, in 1975, Khun Sun was assigned work as a railway engineer. In December 1978, he and his wife were murdered during the last purges, which happened two weeks before the end of Pol Pot's regime, just Khun Srun's nine-year-old daughter, Khun Khem, survived & taken by the Khmer Rouge and compelled to live among them in the forest on the Cambodian border. Besides his two famous books, The Last Residence and The Accused, during his life, there were many books that he had published such as The Beauty of Life, About Love— For Young People and My Views