Articles

David of Thailand

It is a wonder that an impoverished boy from rice fields of Isan should survive the drudgery, disease, poverty, political upheavals and massacres in the struggle for democracy to be able, years later, to offer readers his literary works written originally in English. Author Pira Canning Sudham, seen as being "David of Thailand," has gathered the fifth stone called Shadowed Country to combat Goliath.

Dr John Bernard, Professor of English, Macquarie University, Australia, commented: "Pira Canning Sudham’s literary works are not the sort of books one can put down. There is sophistication robed in simplicity, which I found very effective; there is delicacy and good taste, even when the subject matter is painful or gross. Much as I enjoyed the technique of his writing, the surface of his art, it was the subject matter, which stays in the mind. One speaks of the unsolved problem of poverty and corruption, and Sudham depicts the peasant as the prey to even more numerous and rapacious persecutors than before. Bright lights and tall buildings in Bangkok means so little in the harsh life he writes about and it is sad indeed that the darker side of human nature should be gaining even more power over the people with whom he relates. I know that in his works, the balance is provided by the loving depiction of the humanity of these people; hopefully the innate and, to a degree, universal qualities of positive nature should in some sense win the day."

"Foreign writers writing about the Thai people look at Thailand from the outside, but Pira Canning Sudham write about his people and country as seen from the inside. This is one of the things that makes them so fascinating."
Professor Walter G. Langlois

"Pira Canning Sudham is the kind of writer who is invaluable to a country like Thailand. He is a writer who believes in development but not revolution, social justice but not communism, and who has learned that not all the Westernization in the world can take from a good man his responsibility to his own people."
South China Morning Post