I am a foreign correspondent and editor, and spent much of the past decade in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. I am currently based in Hungary.
I am also the author of When Clouds Fell from the Sky: A Disappearance, A Daughter’s Search and Cambodia’s First War Criminal. It was published in April 2015, the 40th anniversary of the fall of Phnom Penh to Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge.
When Clouds Fell from the Sky combines the lives of five people to recount the causes and consequences of the Khmer Rouge’s catastrophic totalitarian rule between 1975 and 1979 when two million people died.
it shows how a devastating act of violence against one person had repercussions that can never be undone. You can read much more about it on the book’s website - www.whencloudsfell.com.
In 2012 I wrote the 21,000-word text for the iPad app Quest for Land by then-Magnum photographer John Vink, a long-term resident of Cambodia. John has spent more than a decade documenting land and evictions, and his app is a vital record of one of the country’s most pressing problems.
John and I have also collaborated on two e-books: 30 Years for a Trial (about the war crimes trial of S-21‘s Comrade Duch) and A Fine Thread (about the growth of the garment industry in Cambodia).
I was the president of the Overseas Press Club of Cambodia, an association of foreign journalists, between 2010 and 2012. The OPCC stands for press freedom and related issues, and brings together like-minded people on media issues.
1.Nuns protest the killing of women candidates ahead of the general election in 2003.
2.Two men rescue wooden boards at a huge slum fire in Phnom Penh in 2002.
3.Angkor Wat at night. The most renowned aspect of Cambodia, and the drawcard for two million tourists each year.
Finally, all images and articles on this site are copyright. Either they belong to the broadcaster/wire service or to John Vink as noted, or if they are unattributed then they are mine. Please don’t take them. Many thanks.
You can find information about my book as well as a selection of my television stories, print articles, radio broadcasts and photographs on these pages.
Or by phoning my Hungarian mobile (bearing in mind the time difference of course).