If you’re a Harry Potter fan and worried you won’t be able to get your fix of the last installment of the boy wizard’s adventures while travelling, fret not – Harry Potter will be released in Thailand on July 21st, just like everywhere else
I regularly answer questions about Thailand on Yahoo! Answers and this morning an amusing one popped up – the question poster was travelling to Thailand but worried that she wouldn’t be able to buy the new Harry Potter book when it was published – or worse, it would all be in Thai!
Funnily enough, just last night in the pub I’d been talking to a friend who is Head Buyer for one of Thailand’s biggest bookstores and he was telling me about the gear up for the release of Harry Potter here. I have it on good authority that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – or Harry Potter Book 7 to make things easier – will definitely be available in English in Thailand’s bookshops.
Just like everywhere else in the world, there is Potter mania in Thailand – thousands of copies are being shipped over and bookstores across Bangkok and the country are getting ready for the worldwide publication date of July 21st. To begin with, only the English language version is available, and then the Thai language version will be published in a few months time. I’d imagine that Harry Potter has been one of the single biggest incentives for Thai kids to learn to read English. Certainly the Potter films are hugely popular – Harry Potter And The Order of the Phoenix has just opened in Bangkok and it’s playing wall to wall at all the big multiplexes.
The Harry Potter display in Asia Books, Emporium, Bangkok
It’s interesting to see what Western stuff makes the cultural jump in Thailand and what doesn’t. Potter is huge here but Star Wars, perhaps the only thing of a similar phenomenon from my own childhood, barely registered when it arrived in Thailand. Episode III showed for about 2 weeks and then disappeared from cinemas. Maybe Potter connects with Thai readers because Thai culture has so much belief in magic and spirits as part of everyday life, or maybe it’s simply the juggernaut of marketing winning over everything. (Time magazine recently ran an interesting story on the process of getting J.K. Rowling’s final manuscript to the editors and then printers while keeping it secret, as this is officially the biggest first printing in history – 11 million books just for the US market).
But Harry Potter’s popularity is not something sudden, and it’s not confined to Thailand either. A few years ago I did a visa run to Myanmar, stopping off in the Burmese town of Kawthaung before crossing back into Thailand. While we were there, my friend Melissa found a bookshop selling Harry Potter in Burmese translation. She bought a copy for the Burmese boat boy working on her dive boat back in Thailand, and promptly made a friend for life. It seems Harry Potter’s magic is just as potent even in translation in the most far flung corners of the world.
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