Soth Polin is one of Cambodia’s most distinctive and uncompromising literary voices. Born in Kampong Cham Province in 1943, he emerged as a major literary figure during the 1960s, publishing novels, short stories and journalism that challenged social conventions and political orthodoxies. Following the upheavals that transformed Cambodia in the 1970s, he lived in exile in France and later in the United States. His fiction is renowned for its psychological intensity, philosophical depth and unsparing exploration of desire, alienation, violence and political disillusionment. Widely regarded as a cult figure in modern Cambodian literature, Soth Polin’s work offers a unique literary record of Cambodia before the Khmer Rouge and of the enduring consequences of exile and historical catastrophe. The Anarchist is considered one of his most important works.
