Once referred to by the International
Herald Tribune as “the most well-known expatriate Thai in the world,” Somtow Sucharitkul is no longer an
expatriate, since he has returned to Thailand after five decades of wandering
the world. He is best known as an
award-winning novelist and a composer of operas.
Born in Bangkok, Somtow grew up in Europe and was educated at
Eton and Cambridge. His first
career was in music and in the 1970s, his first return to Asia, he acquired a
reputation as a revolutionary composer, the first to combine Thai and Western
instruments in radical new sonorities. Conditions in the arts in the region at the time proved so traumatic for
the young composer that he suffered a major burnout, emigrated to the United
States, and reinvented himself as a novelist.
His earliest novels were in the science fiction field and he soon
won the John W. Campbell for Best New Writer as well as being nominated for and
winning numerous other awards in the field. But science fiction was not able to contain him and he began
to cross into other genres. In his
1984 novel Vampire Junction, he
injected a new literary inventiveness into the horror genre, in the words of
Robert Bloch, author of Psycho, “skillfully
combining the styles of Stephen King, William Burroughs, and the author of the Revelation to John.” Vampire Junction was voted one of
the forty all-time greatest horror books by the Horror Writers’ Association,
joining established classics like Frankensteinand Dracula.
In the 1990s Somtow became increasingly identified as a uniquely
Asian writer with novels such as the semi-autobiographical Jasmine Nights and a series of stories noted for a peculiarly Asian
brand of magic realism, such as Dragon’s
Fin Soup, which is currently being made into a film directed by Takashi
Miike. He recently won the World
Fantasy Award, the highest accolade given in the world of fantastic literature,
for his novella The Bird Catcher. His forty-seven books have sold
about two million copies world-wide.
After becoming a Buddhist monk for a period in 2001, Somtow
decided to refocus his attention on the country of his birth, founding
Bangkok’s first international opera company and returning to music, where he
again reinvented himself, this time as a neo-Asian neo-Romantic composer. The Norwegian government commissioned
his song cycle Songs Before Dawn for
the 100th Anniversary of the Nobel Peace Prize, and he composed at the request
of the government of Thailand his Requiem:
In Memoriam 9/11 which was dedicated to the victims of the 9/11
tragedy.
According to London’s Operamagazine, “in just five years, Somtow has made Bangkok into the operatic
hub of Southeast Asia.” His operas
on Thai themes, Madana and Mae Naak, have been well received by
international critics. Bangkok’s Ring Cycle which is
His current project is Ayodhya,a modern opera re-telling the entire myth of the Ramayana in a single evening. He has written both the libretto and the music for this spectacular work
which will premiere in November 2006 and which he has dedicated to His Majesty
the King.