Makhali-Phâl

Nelly-Pierrette Guesde (1908 – November 15, 1965), best known by her pen name Makhali-Phâl, was a French Cambodian poet and novelist.

Though her writing largely focused on the Cambodia of her youth, Guesde never returned to her birth country, and she did not speak Khmer as an adult. She never married, although she lived with a much older romantic partner until his death in 1957. She died in Pau in 1965.

Her first novel, La Favorite de dix ans, received positive critical reception for dealing with encounters between her different cultures; it was translated into English in 1942 as The Young Concubine, gaining a significant readership in the United States. It was followed by her book Narayana, ou Celui qui se meut sur les eaux, which won the Académie Française's Prix Lange [fr] in 1944.

A 1940 article in the journal L'Echo annamite paid homage to Makhali-Phâl's writing on her Buddhist and Khmer culture: "Cambodge is a short poem in three parts. But it is enough to mark Makhali-Phâl as the greatest Buddhist poet of our day. ... The Khmer people, who have been silent for millennia, have suddenly found this child with a prophetic voice to tell the world of her miracle and her first faith."

Nelly-Pierrette Guesde was born in 1908 in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, although by some accounts her birth year was 1898. She was the daughter of a Cambodian mother, Néang Mali, and a father who was a member of the French colonial administration, Pierre Mathieu Théodore Guesde. In her early childhood she received a Buddhist education, but her father then placed her in a convent, as he wanted to give her a Catholic education. At age seven, she left Cambodia to live in France, in Pau, with her paternal grandmother and grandfather, who by at least one account was the writer Jules Guesde.