In The Phnom Penh Post Emily Wight profiles president of the Cambodia Librarians and Documentalists Association Hok Sothik in Bookish champion hopes to boost Cambodia's lost culture of reading, as they held the third Cambodia Book Fair over the weekend.
It's apparently difficult to drum up interest, as what literary culture there was obviously suffered greatly under the Khmer Rouge ("Books were used to make cigarettes. Teachers, authors and books were all destroyed, as was so much of an entire generation") and even now: "people aren't very interested in books".
Among the projects working to change that is the Nou Hach Literary Journal, profiled in another piece in The Phnom Penh Post, by Cecelia Marshall, who reports that: Cambodian literary journal sees revival.
It's apparently difficult to drum up interest, as what literary culture there was obviously suffered greatly under the Khmer Rouge ("Books were used to make cigarettes. Teachers, authors and books were all destroyed, as was so much of an entire generation") and even now: "people aren't very interested in books".
Among the projects working to change that is the Nou Hach Literary Journal, profiled in another piece in The Phnom Penh Post, by Cecelia Marshall, who reports that: Cambodian literary journal sees revival.