Creator

Roger Warner

American author and journalist who co-wrote Haing S. Ngor's autobiography.

Roger Warner is an American journalist and author who co-wrote the autobiography of Haing Ngor, first published in 1987 as Haing Ngor: A Cambodian Odyssey.[1][2] The book was later reissued as Survival in the Killing Fields. It is written from Ngor's account of the Khmer Rouge years.[1][2]

Career

Book cover with the title in large black letters over a drawing of a battle scene.
Cover of Shooting at the Moon.

Warner worked as a freelance journalist in Thailand. In 1980 he met Hmong refugees at Ban Vinai refugee camp, and that same year he met Haing Ngor, a Cambodian doctor, in a Cambodian refugee camp.[3][4] Their work together became Ngor's autobiography, which Warner wrote with him in an "as told to" collaboration.[3][5] Ngor was killed in 1996. For the 2003 edition of Survival in the Killing Fields, Warner wrote a new epilogue about Ngor's last years, which Ngor lived "like his country: scarred, and incapable of fully healing."[4] In the podcast Who Killed Haing Ngor?, Warner talks with Patricia Nunan about how karma, revenge and untreated PTSD shaped Ngor's life after the Khmer Rouge.[6]

Warner's other books include Invisible Hand, about drug smugglers and growers.[2][3] His first history of the war in Laos was published in hardcover in 1995 as Back Fire and in paperback as Shooting at the Moon: The Story of America's Clandestine War in Laos. It won a prize and good reviews.[3][4] He later made Out of Laos, a visual history of the Laos war for younger Hmong Americans. Its first edition, published in 1998 in English and in Hmong, was funded by a small grant and printed in black and white. During the COVID-19 lockdown he expanded it to 608 pages in color.[3]

Works

Book cover with the title in red and black beside a close-up of Haing S. Ngor's face.
Cover of Surviving the Killing Fields by Haing S. Ngor with Roger Warner.


See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Publishers Weekly, Roger Warner author page
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Los Angeles Times, The Performance of His Life, review of Haing Ngor: A Cambodian Odyssey (January 31, 1988)
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 Out of Laos, About the Author
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Barnes & Noble, Survival in the Killing Fields, paperback (December 26, 2003)
  5. ↑ University of Nebraska Omaha, Holocaust and Genocide Research Guide: Cambodian genocide
  6. ↑ Who Killed Haing Ngor?, Season Two
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This page was last edited on 16 October 2026, at 22:03.