Lucas Stewart is an award winning author and literature programmer.

Born in the UK he has spent over 20 years living in Asia and Africa, including Iraq, Sudan and Myanmar. A former Literature Advisor to the British Council overseeing a 5 year programme on freedom of creativity in ethnic minority literature in Myanmar (2013 – 2018), he has advised leading international literature organisations such as PEN International, the Publishers Circle Delegation, Index on Censorship, the UK’s National Centre for Writing, Asia House and the Hedda Foundation on transitional literature and literary industries in Myanmar. His debut non-fiction book The People Elsewhere: Unbound Journeys with the Storytellers of Myanmar (Penguin/Viking 2016) was shortlisted for the 2018 Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Other non-fiction, on ethnic nationality literature and wider literary censorship, have been published widely including Pen America, The Diplomat and the Asia Literary Review.

He is co-editor, with Alfred Birnbaum, of Hidden Words, Hidden Worlds: Contemporary Short Stories from Myanmar, (British Council, 2017), the first anthology of translated ethnic Myanmar short stories published in the UK. His own short stories have won the national DA Prize for Short Fiction, longlisted for the international Commonwealth Short Story Award, nominated for Best of the Net and appeared in multiple places including twice anthologized by UK ‘Publisher of the Year’, Comma Press (most recently Resist: Stories of Uprising, Oct 2019). In 2017 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society. He is co-founder of the Kachin Uncivil War short story project.