Writer Profile: Ahpor Rahmonya
Min Yar Moe (b. 1977) grew up in Thoung Pha Lu Village, Thanbuzayat Township in Mon State. After finishing middle school, he began to borrow banned Mon language books, printed in Thailand and smuggled across the nearby border by Mon political and cultural organisations …
He entered a monastery in his twenties to study advanced Pali for five years and wrote his first Mon language article when he was 23. Despite the routine censorship and shut-down of ethnic language journals, some endured, and he has published over fifty articles and poems.
His articles explore the dynamics between national politics and the Mon people, while his poems are written to educate the youth and often depict renowned Western and Asian intellectuals and thinkers. He is well known among the Mon literary community and is regularly invited by local civil society organisations to talk on Mon language and literature. He currently lives in a Mon speaking village in Karen State where he stood in the 2015 general election for the Mon National Party. He writes under the pen name Ahpor Rahmonya
*This is the ninth in a series of adapted profiles on writers taken from the 2017 anthology Hidden Words Hidden Worlds: Contemporary Short Stories from Myanmar