Author. Literature. Myanmar
Myanmar has yet to face the overwhelming and savage force of centralised, literary capitalism. All bookshops in the country, with the exception of those owned by the state, are ‘independent’. There are no national chains listed on a stock exchange. No Barnes and Noble. No Waterstones. There is a Kinokuniya but it has not yet dared venture beyond the safety of the new International airport terminal …
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Just a quick reminder that i will be appearing at the Writing on the Wall Lockdown literary festival online tomorrow at 6.00 pm UK time/11.30 pm Myanmar time …
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I am delighted to announce that I been invited to appear at the Writing on the Wall literary festival on 21st May. With the global lock-down, the Liverpool based festival has moved online and is free for everyone to watch …
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A sadaik is a wooden chest, bound in lacquer and used for centuries in Myanmar, both in monasteries and the Royal court, to hold palm-leaf manuscripts – sermons, poetry, prayers, orders. This sadaik is a hybrid site. It’s a place for my work as a writer, my books, articles, news, etc but it’s also a dedication to literature of Myanmar, a place we have lived for many years.
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It’s the second week of our self-isolation in Yangon. Having spent the last five days digitally scanning the front covers of my Burma Book collection (just in case the worst happens and we are forced to leave them behind) and doing everything I can to distract myself from finishing the novel, I decided to solve a mystery that has irritated me for years.
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Since I started Sadaik back in 2012, it’s always been about one thing. To promote literature in English translation from a country that had objectively suffered from the longest, state sanction literary censorship regime seen in the world since World War 2 other than North Korea …
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I originally started this post with a rundown of all the new non-fiction books that have been published overseas since the beginning of the recent Rohingya crisis in 2017 but then realised it would simply be too long for it to be of any use …
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The e-book of the Hidden Word, Hidden Worlds anthology is finally here!!
In 2012 the British Council sought to take advantage of new freedoms in literature and travel through a programme of workshops. The aim of the five-year literature programme in Myanmar was to give a voice to unheard and aspiring writers from the ethnic states …
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A couple of weeks late to this, but the Myanmar Publishers and Booksellers Association held their annual awards on January 8th at the Shwe U Daung Hall near the Secretariat …
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With the Rakhine non-fiction writer, Wai Hin Aung (don’t be surprised if you have never heard of him) currently serving 20 years for high treason and the ongoing trials (plural!) and tribulations of the Peacock Generation poetic satire group, comes another writer currently wanted for, well, opening his mouth …
continue readingSein Sein (b.1928 – 1972) was one of the most successful of the second generation of 20th Century female Burmese writers (a generation that included Journal Kyaw Ma Ma Lay and Khin Hnin Yu) …
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Though the Mon secured their place in world history through the introduction of Buddhism and the first indigenous script to South East Asia, this place is little known and only barely recorded by the Mon themselves …
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Sarpay Lawka (World of Books) is the granddaddy of bookshops in Yangon. Though there maybe one or two specialist shops focussing on Buddhist liturgical texts that are older, Sarpay Lawka is accepted as the oldest general trade bookshop …
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Descendants of Ming royalist’s fleeing the Manchu conquerors in China, the Khokant are ethnic Chinese who live in a thin strip of land along Myanmar’s north eastern Shan State. Like many of the ethnic communities they have endured decades of conflict, though unlike many of the ethnic groups their language and literature has escaped relatively unscathed …
continue readingZa Wa Na (real name U Thein) was born 1911. One of Myanmar’s earliest comedic and satirical writers, he made his name at the age of 24 with the publication of ‘College Student’ a semi-fictional account of a student and his experiences at college. …
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The emergence of a ‘Burmese’ literature in the 1910’s and 1920’s was influenced by the import and translation of western literary forms, in novels and short stories. Though this influence has arguably been exaggerated, the first true Burmese language novel by James Hla Gyaw has been often called an adaption of Duma’s Count of Monte Cristo, in reality the two share only a peripheral resemblance …
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Mi Mi Khaing’s memoir still stands as a classic of Burmese non-fiction, though it’s been 70 years since its initial publication. A multi-generational memoir, it follows the life of the author’s elite non-typical family …
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Seikku Cho Cho’s owner, San Oo is a known poet and artist, but his real passion lies in his publishing house. Originally operating from a two-storey brick house on 164th street, the printing press was housed in the garage and a small shop selling their titles at the front of the main house.
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The Kachin are among the latest arrivals to Myanmar, descending south from the mountains that border the north of Myanmar with China at some point in the 16th or 17th century. They travelled east and west, to Yunnan province in China and to India …
Continue readingKo Nyein (Mandalay) is a Modernist poet and short story writer. Born in 1945 in the city after which he takes his pen-name, his first poems appeared in the respected Moe Way magazine, such as ‘A Boat with Three Men’, and ‘A Man with a Rickshaw’ and later in the 1990’s his short stories were featured in Shwe Amyutae journal …
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The British Council might be a strange place to put on a list of prominent literary landmarks in Myanmar, but its library has played an influential role in the fight against decades of literary censorship in Yangon. The British Council’s original location was in Rander House on Pansodan Street, lower block, in the 1950’s.
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Moe Linn, a life-long democracy activist, was hired as Aung San Suu Kyi’s cook after house arrest in the 90’s and spent the next 20 years in close company with her. Up Close is a collection of 24 articles written by Moe Lin and published in 2011 and 2012 with original pieces, diary entries and letters …
continue readingKyaw Swar Htet (b. 1957) is another short story specialist from the second city of Mandalay. A medical doctor by training, his short stories, at least until 2000, were originally written in a blend of romance and medicine …
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While many imported literary forms have been adapted by Burmese writers, it is the ‘wuthu saungbar’ which the writers have embraced and perfected. A masterwork of the blend in fact and fiction, this particular road, begun by Ludu U Hla in the 1950s, follows Mya Than Tint on a 1980’s literary tour of the country and …
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With 5 locations across the city and 1 in Mandalay, MBC knows where the profit is. Many of their centres are heavily focussed on educational, self-help and children’s books. But their main centre, in an old colonial house with a huge garden is where to go …
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The Karen, living along Myanmar’s eastern border with Thailand are notable for being the earliest converts to Christianity in Myanmar and for enduring the longest civil conflict in Myanmar …
continue readingChaw Ei Man (Mandalay) was born in 1973. Her first short story ‘No Affection’ was published in Myit Tan Shin magazine in 1998 and two years later her first full collection titled ‘Realistic Dreams and Other Stories’, culminating in a prestigious Shwe Amyutae award for ‘Fly to Mandalay’.
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Nothing about this squat, grey, block of a building would have it marked as a venue that has graced not one, but two Nobel laureates. Once the home of the Rangoon Times, the first all-English language newspaper in Myanmar that ran from 1856 to 1942, it was also visited by the great writer Rabindranath Tagore in 1932, during his third and last visit to the city. Apparently, he spoke and read from his work …
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A retired Colonel, and purged associate of former Military Intelligence chief Gen Khin Nyunt, U Hla Min goes to great effort to justify the 1990 military coup and the positive development it allegedly bought to the nation in the years after …
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A sister shop to the larger OS store on 37th Street. This iteration opened in 2017 to take advantage of the busy foot traffic on Pansodan. The manager, U Han Myint, often seen from the main street with a book in his hand through the open shutter space, has complete control over the shop, including purchases and sales …
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The Mon are the oldest civilisation in the South East Asia region. Once a powerful empire whose lands and influence stretched across the Indo-China mainland, they are responsible for the introduction of Buddhism to the region and can attest to the oldest script in the region dating back to at least the 500’s AD …
continue readingKhin Mya Zin (b.1956) is a poetess, painter and short story writer. Her first short story was published in 1974 while another 4 years later ‘Mother is a Teacher’ was translated into Japanese and Russian …
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In the pantheon of great Burmese writers from the 20th century, one stands tall above all others. The unofficial literature laureate of the Bama, a typesetter, a playwright, a journalist, a poet and a novelist, Thakin Kodaw Hmaing straddled two literary worlds …
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‘Resist: Stories of Uprising’ is the follow up to Comma Press’ hugely successful ‘history-into-fiction’ series. My story, titled ‘No Pasaran’, is set during the Liverpool dockers dispute of 1995 to 1998 and follows two dockers who embark on an international journey of solidarity …
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On November 8th 2015, Myanmar held its first democratic elections in a quarter of a century. The literary freedom organisation PEN Myanmar sought to document this momentous day through literature …
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As if Yangon needed to cement itself even further as a city of books, in 2017, a street of books opened on Theinbyu road on the east side of the Secretariat. The initiative of short story specialist and current Minister of Information, U Pe Myint to encourage the city’s residents to embrace their literary heritage and love for literature …
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The Myanmar Writers Association has a long and twisted history in Myanmar. Dating back to at least the parliamentary democratic era in the 1950’s, the association, initially independent, was brought under the control of both the Ministry of Information and the Ministry of Home Affairs, during the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s …
continue readingChit Oo Nyo (b.1947) is a notable historical novelist, academic and scriptwriter. Though born in Mandalay, he has spent most of his life in education, working in one capacity or another in the philosophy departments of universities across the country including the National University of Arts and Culture in Yangon …
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For centuries, the Chin people, who now live in the hills that border Bangladesh and India, were animist, tracing their own oral histories that began when they left their original ‘chinram’, or homeland, a dark cave. When the Christian missionaries came, following the British imperial invasion of the Chin Hills in the last decade of the 19th Century, their first mission took root in Hakha, now the capital town of the Chin Hills.
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Memoirs are a common genre in Burmese literature in translation, and yet here, we have something unique. Dr Myint Swe’s memoir of his time at Rangoon General Hospital No.1 is a rare and enjoyable account of wartime Burma under the Japanese occupation from the life of a Burman.
continue readingPonnya Khin (b. 1972) is a novelist and short story writer. Born in Ayeyarwaddy Region, she worked at various jobs, including a primary school teacher and journalist. She published her first story in 1993, moved to Yangon and has, unusually, written full time since 2000. She has achieved this through an immense literary output …
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Subtitled as a collection of the greatest wonders in Myanmar, it is no surprise that the bulk of this informative and well-researched collated series of articles focus on the largest and oldest ‘religious’ monuments; the monasteries, images and …
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Supposedly the largest bookshop chain in Myanmar in terms of floor space, TAB has grown a reputation as a solid bookstore, popular with younger customers in their 20’s and 30’s thanks a wide selection of genres from literary fiction, politics and education spread across their six locations.
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The smallest of the three main ethnic communities from Kayah State on Myanmar’s eastern border with Thailand, the Kayaw’s literature and culture committee is also the oldest …
continue readingMa Ju (b. 1958): Like her younger contemporary Ma Thida, Ma Ju is a medical doctor by training though more well known as one of Myanmar’s leading women writers. She is renowned for her position on gender equality and female empowerment, themes often mirrored in her strong female characters and …
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If there was to be a single place that embodies the turbulent rise and fall of literature in Myanmar from Independence to the present day, it is the Sarpay Beikmann and its eponymous building in downtown Kyauktada township.
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In this slim chapbook a sense of place is everywhere, guided by the subtleness of San Oo’s voice which shifts, from civility to a harshness unexpected. Throughout, the senses are lulled by a cadence brought on repetitious cycles, yet, Nyunt Wai Moe’s impressive translation, never falters, it never bores. The Rainy Season Setting is to be read in a single sitting, to do otherwise would be to disrupt the voyage.
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Hakha is the capital of Chin State, Myanmar’s least developed region and a restricted area for foreigners without permits until 2012. With very few roads, and many of the villages clinging to remote hillsides, it is detached from the literary centres of the country …
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Formed out of the ashes of the government controlled Myanmar Writers and Journalists Association in 2013, the MPU began life as a place for poets to meet, argue and fight over the direction of the form in Myanmar …
continue readingAung Cheimt (b.1948) is a poet, translator and former political prisoner. Known as a member of the “Revolutionary Poets’, this epithet come from both his time incarcerated in the 1960’s after the military coup and for his contribution in the birth of a more modern stylistic framing of the role poetry could play in 1970’s Myanmar …
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