[3] A descendant of the Royal Chakri dynasty (his grandfather's sister was a cousin and consort of King Vajiravudh),[citation needed] Somtow was born in Bangkok.

Shirley MacLaine saw it, and thinking that it was written by a dead poet, included it in her autobiography, Don't Fall Off the Mountain.

He also wrote and directed the cult horror film The Laughing Dead and co-wrote the Roger Corman-produced Bram Stoker's Burial of the Rats (1995).

The historical fantasy The Shattered Horse holds that Hector's son Astyanax survives the fall of Troy and grows to adulthood to meet many of the characters of the Iliad.

Other musical compositions include the “Requiem: In Memoriam 9/11,” commissioned by the government of Thailand as a gift for the victims of the 9/11 events and inspired by the poetry of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and T. S. Eliot.

A hybrid work combining ballet with opera, Suriyothai, based on the life of a Thai queen of the Ayuthaya period, premiered on August 23, 2013.

[needs update] In the 2010s, he was also at work on two more operas, one an adaptation of his fantasy short story "The Fallen Country" and another about the life of Holocaust survivor Helena Citrónová.

"The Snow Dragon", the adaptation of his fantasy story, was set to premiere March 13, 2015, at the Skylight Music Theatre in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, under the baton of Viswa Subbaraman.

Somtow has written episodes of the animated television series Dinosaucers, COPS, and Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers.

When Nobel Prize laureate Wole Soyinka withdrew as keynote speaker at the 2006 SEA Write Awards ceremony in protest of the 2006 Thailand coup that ousted the elected government of Thaksin Shinawatra, Somtow, a critic of Thaksin, replaced Soyinka as keynote speaker.

Somtow agreed to modify the scene and was forced to sign a document giving officials the right to "immediately shut down the opera in mid-performance if, in their sole opinion, a breach of 'tradition' occurs".

Somtow praised a speech by Democrat Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva for being "so balanced, so reasonable, so intelligent, and so well thought through".