Thailand's premier author in the English language, Pira Sudham, is for the first time published in the ebook format. Best known for his novel Monsoon Country, this is an anthology of his short stories previously published in Tales of Thailand and People of Esarn. Who else could write about peasant life in Thailand’s poorest region apart from someone who had been born and bought up in that life? In It is the People are stories of hardship, land loss and the tourist sex trade to which so many of the young are drawn into.
Pira Sudham was born in Napo, Burirum, Northeastern Thailand. He spent his childhood in the rice fields on the Korat Plateau, helping his parents and tending a herd of buffaloes. He went to Bangkok at the age of fourteen to be a servant to monks in a Buddhist temple where he was also admitted to a school. To support himself through high school and the first year at the Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University, he sold souvenirs to tourists until he won a New Zealand government scholarship to study English literature at Auckland University and later at Victoria University, Wellington.
His writing began to appear in literary publications in New Zealand, Hong Kong and the USA before his first book, Siamese Drama (now published under the title of Tales of Thailand) was published in 1983, followed by People of Esarn in 1987. He has lived for over twenty years in New Zealand, Australia and the UK, where he wrote Monsoon Country (1988), and its sequel, The Force of Karma (2002). Both novels have been revised and published under the title of Shadowed Country.
Pira Sudham’s literary works are concerned with socio-economic-political issues. Widely read and highly acclaimed, his books have given a powerful voice to the poor and the maligned people of Esarn.
