Prabda Yoon
Prabda Yoon ปราบดา หยุ่น | |
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| Born | August 2, 1973 Bangkok, Thailand |
| Occupation | Novelist, columnist, Graphic Designer, artist |
| Language | Thai, English |
| Nationality | Thai |
| Website | |
| www | |
Prabda Yoon (Thai: ปราบดา หยุ่น; born on August 2, 1973 in Bangkok) is a Thai writer, novelist, artist, graphic designer, magazine editor, screenwriter, translator and media personality. His literary debut, Muang Moom Shak (City of Right Angles), a collection of five related stories about New York City, and the follow-up story collection, Kwam Na Ja Pen (Probability), both published in 2000, immediately turned him into a sensation of contemporary Thai literature. In 2002, Kwam Na Ja Pen won the S.E.A. Write Award, the most prestigious literary prize in Thailand, making Prabda a household name and icon of his generation. He is among the most well known and influential of Thai writers. Prabda has been prolific, having written over 20 books of fiction and nonfiction in ten years, designed over 100 book covers for many publishers and authors, translated a number of modern western classics such as J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye and Nine Stories, Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange, and Karel Capek's R.U.R. He has also written two acclaimed screenplays for Thai "new wave" filmmaker Pen-Ek Ratanaruang, "Last Life in the Universe" (2003) and "Invisible Waves" (2006). Prabda's literary work has been translated to Japanese and published in Japan regularly. He has exhibited his artworks (paintings, drawings, installations) in Thailand and Japan. He has also produced music and written songs with the bands Buahima and The Typhoon Band, respectively. In 2004, Prabda founded Typhoon Studio, a small publishing house with two imprints, Typhoon Books and Sunday Afternoon. In 2012, he opened Bookmoby Readers' Cafe, a small bookshop at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, along with its online counterpart at www.bookmoby.com.
Family and education
Prabda was born into a wealthy Thai Chinese family. He is the son of well known media personality Suthichai Sae-Yoon, cofounder of The Nation newspaper and current CEO of Nation Multimedia Group, and former magazine editor and novelist Nantawan Sae-Yoon, both living in Bangkok, Thailand. He has one younger sister, Shimboon "Kit" Yoon, who lives with her family in the US. Prabda completed his elementary school education in Bangkok, then attended high school at the Cambridge School of Weston in Weston, Massachusetts. He went to Parsons School of Design in Manhattan, New York City, for two years, majoring in Communication Design, and four more year at the Cooper Union, where he studied graphic design under Dan Friedman and Milton Glaser, film with Robert Breer, graduating from Cooper Union in 1997. Prabda returned to Thailand in 1998 for military service.
Bibliography
Short stories
- Right-angled City
- Probability
- Flood in the Eyes
- The Moving Parts
- This Really happened
- The Shoulders of Mountains
- Cleaning the Dead
- Ancient Planet
Novels
- Chit-tak!, 2002
- Panda, 2004
- Lessons in Rain, 2005
- Under the Snow, 2006
Essays
- Unstill Pictures
- Water for the Skull
- Please Don't Read, Carefully
- Alive: On the Breath of Words
- Imagined Landscapes
- Page Zero
- Hitting the Eyes
- Writing to Japan
- Music with Tears
Screenplays
- Last Life in the Universe, with Pen-Ek Ratanaruang, 2003
- Invisible Waves, 2006
References
Teh, David (December 24, 2005). Picking up the pieces, Bangkok Post. Retrieved December 30, 2005.
