Lang Srey

Cornelia Srey, Lang Srey and Pyara Sandhu, Writers, Inc.

Lang came to the United States as a refugee from the Khmer Rouge genocide when he was fourteen. He finally earned his Bachelor's degree when he was 41! He and Cornelia wrote The Smell of Water and No Front Line because he wanted people to know that what happened in Cambodia can happen again - anywhere.

Cornelia is an independent scholar working in two fields: contemporary and Angkorian Cambodian silk, and the women of the Angkorian elite (with focus on the queens). With the exception of Sappho Marchal in the 1920s, most Angkorian scholars have been men studying men. Cornelia has studied all seven groups of women at Angkor Wat, identified the five groups that had previously been identified incorrectly or not identified at all, and studied their counterparts at the other 50+ temples in Angkor Park. In August of 2024 she published new evidence that the two figures in the Preah Khan temple worshipped by locals as Jayarajadevi and Indradevi are in fact Jayavarman VII's queens. She's one of the last Angkorian scholars to use Sanskrit. And the first to use linguistic analysis – and show other scholars how to use it. She simply wants everyone who goes to Angkor to understand what they see.

Her son Pyara is a Marine Biology major, and co-authored The Wreck of the Saginaw. They inherited the manuscript from the captain, Cornelia's great-grandfather's cousin, and published it a century and a half after the crew was shipwrecked on a barren atoll in the Hawaiian Islands.

Together they've distributed hundreds of pairs of reading glasses in silk-weaving villages, ensuring that weavers can continue to earn a living and pass on their skills until they choose to retire.