Kong Bunchhoeun

Kong Bunchhoeun (Khmer: គង្គ ប៊ុនឈឿន; 18 October 1939 – 17 April 2016) was a Khmer writer, novelist, songwriter, filmmaker, painter, and poet. Bunchhoeun composed more than 200 songs between the 1960s and the 1970s and contributed to “Golden Age” of films and songs in Cambodia. He composed a number of hit songs for Cambodia's greatest singer of all time, Sinn Sisamouth and the contemporary vocalist and singer Preap Sovath. Most of his work touched upon his hometown of Battambang, earning him the pen name “Master Poet of Sangkae River”.

Bunchhoeun composed a number of poems and novels when Cambodian literature flourished in the 1960s, and he survived the Khmer regime partly as he wrote less towards the fall of Phnom Penh to the Khmer Rouge. Currently, there is no real reliable record as to how many novels and songs he might have written. Bunchhoeun's most well-known work of literature, The Fate of Tat Marina, published in 2000, is a loosely fictionalised account of his niece Tat Marina’s affair with Svay Sitha, an undersecretary of state at the Council of Ministers, and the subsequent acid attack that left her suffering ghastly wounds. Marina identified Sitha’s wife, Khourn Sophal, as her attacker.

An arrest warrant for Sophal was signed, but she was never arrested. As Bunchhoeun saw Marina’s story as an opportunity to speak out, he received death threats, fled to Thailand after 2000, and later sought an asylum in Norway in 2005. Bunchhoeun continued writing in self-exile, publishing at least 10 books from abroad.