• Society

Cambodian Literature Back in the Spotlight at National Book Fair

• By Po Sakun
• December 5, 2022 12:39 PM

PHNOM PENH – Cambodia’s annual book fair will soon be back in town for the first time since 2019, while the last two editions were canceled because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Officials and experts hope that the return of the event will help revive the culture of reading and writing among the population.

The fair’s 9th edition is slated for Dec. 9 to 11 at the National Library on street 92. Organizers expect thousands of people to wander around the event’s 195 booths, where writers and publishing companies will sell their books. 

Kim Pinun, an undersecretary of state of the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts, said that the national book fair is organized to promote all kinds of books and encourage people to develop the habit of reading.

As books are founts of knowledge, the fair aims to recognize the value of reading and support enlightening new ideas, he noted.

“We also organize legend storytelling and drawing programs for children to encourage them to love books from a young age. We also want to support the publishing industry in Cambodia and in the world, as well as encourage poets, writers, researchers, and producers to create new works,” he said.

While the Education Ministry is the propeller that pushes the young generations to read and write more, publishing companies and civil society are the executors, said Kok Ros, head of the Ministry’s Department of Book and Reading.

He added that the ministry has organized many competitions on literature to award those with merit.

Nevertheless, despite these efforts, reading culture in Cambodia stays behind its neighbors, even among children or youth, argued Hok Sothi, president of the Cambodian Librarian and Documentalist Association and director of the Sipar Organization. 

He pointed out that the impacts of the civil war and the genocidal periods on the reading culture in Cambodia are still tremendous, and the family and society models in the past decades have not fostered the habit of opening books.

“The next generation may say that old person always talk about the war. But at that time, 80 percent of the intellectuals have been killed and documents have been destroyed. There was no more reading habit,” he stated. 

“Once the war was over, everyone was trying to eat and survive and was not interested in books. We [Sipar] have published 70 to 80 percent of the books for children across the country, to help them develop and cultivate a reading culture.”

The national book fair was canceled in 2020 and 2021 for sanitary reasons. In 2019, 180,000 people attended the three-day event, in which 145 booths were displayed.

This year’s program offers a wide range of events: From bookselling to forums on e-publishing, as well as presentations related to Khmer literature and science, meet-ups with writers, to games for children.



Originally written for ThmeyThmey, this article was translated by Torn Chanritheara for Cambodianess