Khun Srun

The life and writing of Khun Srun is portrayed in Eric Galmard's documentary film, A Tomb for Khun Srun (2015).

"Khun’s last novel, The Accused, published in 1973, is narrated by a writer imprisoned 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. He, a lover of literature, wants to flee the country and be part of the wider world; yet he wants, also, to have the courage to risk his life for his principles. Shortly after The Accused was published, Khun left Phnom Penh and joined the Khmer Rouge." (Madeleine Thien, Brick Magazine)

Khun Srun (Khmer: ឃុន ស្រ៊ុន, 1945–1978) was an important Cambodian writer. He was born in Char village (ភូមិចារ), Rorvieng sub-district (ឃុំរវៀង), Samrong district (ស្រុកសំរោង), Takéo province, into a poor Hakka Chinese Cambodian family. When he was eight, his father, Khun Kim Chheng, a Hakka Chinese man who had fled Communism, died, and he and his six siblings were raised by his Hakka mother, Chi Eng, a small shopkeeper and a devout Buddhist. He began his schooling during the country's first years of independence, when the doors to higher education and professionalization were inching open to all Cambodians, regardless of their social and economic class. A brilliant student, he studied Khmer literature and psychology at the university in Phnom Penh, becoming widely read in sciences, mathematics, and European literature. Amid the turmoil of the 1960s, he worked as a professor 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 less than four years, he published three collections of poems, short tales, and philosophical anecdotes; two collections of autobiographical short stories, The Last Residence and The Accused; and a final volume of poems, For a Woman (this last book was probably never published). He was influenced by both existentialism and Cambodian Buddhism. In 1971, he was imprisoned during 7 months by the right-wing Lon Nol government for refusing to collaborate, but still refused to align himself with the extreme left. In 1973, after being imprisoned for a second time, he finally joined the communist guerrillas. He was only 28, and his life as a writer was finished. After the Khmer Rouge took power, in 1975, Khun Srun (aka Phoeun - ភឿន) was assigned work as a railway engineer). On the 20th of December 1978, he, his wife and their two youngest children were victims of the last purges. They were arrested, transferred to Tuol Sleng prison and probably killed in Choeung Ek, few days before the end of Pol Pot's regime. Only Khun Srun's nine-year-old daughter, Khun Khem, survived, taken by Khmer Rouge cadres and forced to live among them in the forest on the Cambodian-Thai border.