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Journalist Wojciech Tochman addresses the abandoned and lonely in post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia, where the memory of terror persists.
About the author
Wojciech Tochman (b. 1969) is one of the best-known Polish journalists and the author of nine books. His books of reportage have been published in English, French, Arabic, Swedish, Finnish, Slovak, Italian, Russian, Dutch, and Bosnian. His book Like Eating a Stone was a finalist for the Nike Literary Prize and for the Prix Témoin du Monde, awarded by Radio France International. It was published in English by Granta in 2008. Tochman runs the Polish Reportage Institute together with Paweł Goźliński and Mariusz Szczygieł.
Antonia Lloyd-Jones has translated works by many of Poland’s leading contemporary novelists, including Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk, Jacek Dehnel, Mariusz Szczygieł, and Artur Domosławski. She has been a mentor for the Emerging Translator Mentorship Program and co-chair of the UK Translators Association. In 2018 she was honored with Poland’s Transatlantyk Award for the most outstanding promoter of Polish literature abroad.
Summary
Equipped with the sensitivity known from his earlier reportages, in Roosters Crow, Dogs Whine, Wojciech Tochman addresses people with mental illnesses in Cambodia who are imprisoned in kennels, chained up, and locked in cells—often by their own families, who are desperate and at a loss for what to do. Doctors from the Transcultural Psychosocial Organization, in turn, face a great challenge in helping these people because there are only fifty psychiatrists in a country of sixteen million people. Roosters Crow, Dogs Whine approaches both the doctors and their patients with empathy, and also highlights the country’s other social problems, such as slave labor or the lack of sensitivity in society.
A thematic continuation of Polish journalist Tochman’s self-described "dark triptych" about societies affected by genocides, Roosters Crow, Dogs Whine presents a portrait of a Cambodia in which the memory of the Khmer Rouge terror is still alive, where the nation is suffering from a trauma referred to as baksbat, or “broken courage syndrome.”
Foreword
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