His fifty-three books have sold about two million copies world-wide.Īfter becoming a Buddhist monk for a period in 2001, Somtow decided to refocus his attention on the country of his birth, founding Bangkok's first international opera company and returning to music, where he again reinvented himself, this time as a neo-Asian neo-Romantic composer. He won the World Fantasy Award, the highest accolade given in the world of fantastic literature, for his novella The Bird Catcher. In the 1990s Somtow became increasingly identified as a uniquely Asian writer with novels such as the semi-autobiographical Jasmine Nights. In his 1984 novel Vampire Junction, he injected a new literary inventiveness into the horror genre, in the words of Robert Bloch, author of Psycho, 'skillfully combining the styles of Stephen King, William Burroughs, and the author of the Revelation to John.' Vampire Junction was voted one of the forty all-time greatest horror books by the Horror Writers' Association, joining established classics like Frankenstein and Dracula. His earliest novels were in the science fiction field but he soon began to cross into other genres.

Conditions in the arts in the region at the time proved so traumatic for the young composer that he suffered a major burnout, emigrated to the United States, and reinvented himself as a novelist.

His first career was in music and in the 1970s he acquired a reputation as a revolutionary composer, the first to combine Thai and Western instruments in radical new sonorities. He is best known as an award-winning novelist and a composer of operas.īorn in Bangkok, Somtow grew up in Europe and was educated at Eton and Cambridge. Once referred to by the International Herald Tribune as 'the most well-known expatriate Thai in the world,' Somtow Sucharitkul is no longer an expatriate, since he has returned to Thailand after five decades of wandering the world. A Crash Course in the History of Black Science Fiction.200 Significant SF Books by Women, 1984-2001.

Moon Dance by S.P. Somtow