Creator
Vaddey Ratner
Cambodian American novelist whose fiction draws on her survival of the Khmer Rouge period.
Vaddey Ratner is a Cambodian American novelist, the author of In the Shadow of the Banyan (2012) and Music of the Ghosts (2017).[1][2] A survivor of the Khmer Rouge genocide, she came to the United States as a war refugee.[1][3] Her books have been translated into twenty languages.[1]
Life
Ratner was a young child in Phnom Penh when the Khmer Rouge came to power in 1975 and ordered the city emptied.[4][1] Over the next four years she endured forced labor in the rice fields, starvation and near execution.[1][4] She escaped across the border to the Khao I Dang refugee camp in Thailand.[3][2] In 1981 she arrived in rural Missouri as a refugee, not knowing English. She later moved to Minnesota, and in 1990, while living in the Torre de San Miguel housing project in Saint Paul, she graduated as her high school class valedictorian.[1][2] In high school she read Elie Wiesel's Night, and it moved her to want to write one day about survival under the Khmer Rouge.[2][5]
She graduated summa cum laude from Cornell University, where she specialized in Southeast Asian history and literature.[1][3] She then lived in the Washington, D.C., area and worked in international affairs.[3] She made her first trip back to Cambodia in 1992, and in 2005 she returned to live in Phnom Penh for four years.[2] She lives in the United States.[1]
Novels
In the Shadow of the Banyan (2012) is an autobiographical novel based on Ratner's childhood under the Khmer Rouge.[1][2] It follows Raami, a girl from an aristocratic Cambodian family whose world falls apart when the Khmer Rouge take over. Ratner changed some details of her own experience, such as the order of events and the size of the family, and made Raami a couple of years older than she was. The forced exile and violence in the countryside follow what really happened.[5] She first tried to write the story as a memoir, but chose the novel because she could not fully trust her memory of the exact events, places and chronology.[2] The story is told from a small child's point of view, so that the reader meets the genocide through a child's eyes.[6] Of her purpose, Ratner has said: "I wanted to honor the lives lost and those who made monumental sacrifices to save me."[1]
Music of the Ghosts was published in April 2017.[2] It is set in the aftermath of the genocide and follows two main characters, Suteera and the Old Musician, through the legacy of that time and a journey toward atonement and forgiveness. It explores the relationship between perpetrator and victim.[6][1] Ratner has said the book is less autobiographical than her first, though Suteera draws on her own emotional journey. In both novels, music and myth shape the story as much as memory and history.[6]
Recognition
In the Shadow of the Banyan became a New York Times bestseller and appeared on eight lists of the best books of 2012.[1] It was a finalist for the 2013 PEN/Hemingway Award and the 2013 Indies Choice Book of the Year, and it was one of five books to receive an Adult Debut Honor Award from the American Booksellers Association.[1][3] The National Endowment for the Arts chose it for its Big Read program for 2015 to 2016.[1] Music of the Ghosts was a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice and was longlisted for the 2018 Aspen Words Literary Prize.[1][3] As of 2023, her novels had not been translated into Khmer.[7]
Ratner has been interviewed by Lynn Neary on NPR's Morning Edition and by Marty Moss-Coane on Radio Times in Philadelphia.[8] Her life and work have been profiled in USA Today and The Washington Post.[1] She has spoken at the PEN/Faulkner Foundation's annual gala on art and resilience, to the United Nations Association on human rights and global citizenship, and at the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature on bravery in art and politics.[1]
Works
- In the Shadow of the Banyan (Book)
- Music of the Ghosts (Book)
See also
References
- ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 1.12 1.13 1.14 1.15 1.16 Vaddey Ratner, About Vaddey Ratner
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 National Endowment for the Arts, NEA Big Read: In the Shadow of the Banyan
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 Vaddey Ratner, Wikipedia
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Vaddey Ratner, Features
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 NHPR, In the 'Shadow' of Death, Stories Survive (August 14, 2012)
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 PEN Transmissions, Knowing Is a Kind of Pain: An Interview with Vaddey Ratner (January 29, 2026)
- ↑ Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, Novels of Vaddey Ratner and Viet Thanh Nguyen: unpacking trauma language, facing ghosts, and killing shadows (March 20, 2023)
- ↑ Vaddey Ratner, Interviews