Suon Sorin’s popular novel A New Sun Rises over the Old Land (1961) is part of a larger literary moment in Cambodian history. The diminishing French empire, along with the dissolution of Indochina, had triggered an identity crisis among Khmer intellectuals. To create a new, more stable identity centred on Cambodia, these intellectuals developed the broloam lok (the modern Khmer novel) as a canvas on which to project a collective cultural image. The broloam lok soon began to capture the Cambodian imagination: fewer than two novels per year were published in the 1940s, but this number rose to seventy in 1957 and a hundred in 1966. These novels covered a wide range of topics, from prostitution, to the flight of urban workers, to the lives of the middle class.

Ly Team Teng, a Khmer literary critic, noted in 1970 that ‘the literature produced during these times is valuable in every way, worthy of being named independence literature or national literature’. Sorin’s novel, like much of the literature of Cambodia in this period, captures the everyday lives of ordinary Cambodians.

• Tags: Cambodia, Issue 19, Siti Keo, Suon Sorin