Holiday in Cambodia by Laura Jean McKay

JUDGES' COMMENTS

An assured debut story collection, Holiday in Cambodia is a menacing exploration of contemporary Cambodian experience. Stories move between local and outsider perspectives in portraits of roadside sellers and prostitutes, backpackers and aid workers. This is a dissipated moral world where soldiers hold their AKs like babies, factory workers faint as they sew westerners’ T-shirts, and where poverty and Prada, killing fields and cocktails all merge and blur under the bored and restless expat gaze.

It is a mark of the author’s control that such a complex world is portrayed with seeming ease. The work carries an authority borne of a writer’s deep familiarity with her material, yet has the courage to venture into risky stylistic territory at times, with occasional forays into weird and dreamlike offshoots from reality. Despite these ambitious tonal variations the stories combine to form a powerful whole in portraying the collision of history, atrocity, destitution and decadence in a futile search for ‘the real Cambodia’.