Creator

Vaddey Ratner

Cambodian American novelist whose fiction draws on her survival of the Khmer Rouge period.

Vaddey Ratner is a Cambodian American novelist, the author of In the Shadow of the Banyan (2012) and Music of the Ghosts (2017).[1][2] A survivor of the Khmer Rouge genocide, she came to the United States as a war refugee.[1] Her books have been translated into twenty languages.[1]

Life

Ratner was a young child in Phnom Penh in 1975, when the Khmer Rouge took power and ordered the city emptied.[3][1] Over the next four years she endured forced labor in the rice fields, starvation and near execution.[1][3] She escaped over land to a refugee camp in Thailand.[4] She reached rural Missouri as a refugee in 1981, speaking no English. She later moved to Minnesota. In 1990, while she lived at Torre de San Miguel, a housing project in Saint Paul, she was valedictorian of her high school class.[1][2] In high school she read Elie Wiesel's Night, and it moved her to want to write one day about survival under the Khmer Rouge.[2][5]

She graduated summa cum laude from Cornell University, with a focus on the history and literature of Southeast Asia.[1] She later made her home in the Washington, D.C., area.[3] She first went back to Cambodia in 1992, and in 2005 she returned to live in Phnom Penh for four years.[2]

Novels

A dark blue book cover with gold leaves around a small blue seated figure and the title in white.
Cover of Music of the Ghosts (2017).
A cream book cover with a golden banyan tree and a woman and child walking beneath it.
Cover of In the Shadow of the Banyan (2012).

In the Shadow of the Banyan (2012) is an autobiographical novel based on Ratner's childhood under the Khmer Rouge.[1][2] It follows Raami, a girl from an aristocratic Cambodian family whose world falls apart when the Khmer Rouge take over. Ratner changed some details of her own experience, such as the sequence of events and how large the family was, and made Raami a couple of years older than she was. The forced exile and violence in the countryside follow what really happened.[5] She first tried to write the story as a memoir, but chose the novel because she could not fully trust her memory of the exact events, places and chronology.[2] The story is told from a small child's point of view, so that the reader meets the genocide through a child's eyes.[6] Ratner has said she wrote it to honor the lives lost and the people who made great sacrifices to save her.[1]

Music of the Ghosts came out in April 2017.[2] It is set in the aftermath of the genocide and follows two main characters, Suteera and the Old Musician, through the legacy of that time and a journey toward atonement and forgiveness. It explores the relationship between perpetrator and victim.[6][1] Ratner has said the book is less autobiographical than her first, though Suteera draws on her own emotional journey. In both novels, music and myth shape the story as much as memory and history.[6]

Recognition

In the Shadow of the Banyan became a New York Times bestseller and appeared on eight lists of 2012's top books.[1] In 2013 it was a finalist for two prizes, the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Indies Choice Book of the Year.[1] The National Endowment for the Arts chose it for its Big Read program for 2015 to 2016.[1] The New York Times Book Review named Music of the Ghosts an Editor's Choice, and the book was longlisted for the 2018 Aspen Words Literary Prize.[1] As of 2023, her novels had not been translated into Khmer.[7]

Ratner has been interviewed by Lynn Neary on NPR's Morning Edition and by Marty Moss-Coane on Radio Times in Philadelphia.[8] USA Today and The Washington Post have published profiles of her life and work.[1] Her talks include art and resilience at the PEN/Faulkner Foundation's annual gala, human rights and global citizenship for the United Nations Association, and bravery in art and politics at the PEN World Voices Festival.[1]

Works


See also

References 8
  1. ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 1.12 1.13 1.14 1.15 Vaddey Ratner, About Vaddey Ratner
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 National Endowment for the Arts, NEA Big Read: In the Shadow of the Banyan
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Vaddey Ratner, Features
  4. ↑ Bookreporter.com, Interview: Vaddey Ratner (August 9, 2012)
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 NHPR, In the 'Shadow' of Death, Stories Survive (August 14, 2012)
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 PEN Transmissions, Knowing Is a Kind of Pain: An Interview with Vaddey Ratner (January 29, 2026)
  7. ↑ Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, Novels of Vaddey Ratner and Viet Thanh Nguyen: unpacking trauma language, facing ghosts, and killing shadows (March 20, 2023)
  8. ↑ Vaddey Ratner, Interviews
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This page was last edited on 22 October 2026, at 04:28.