Author. Literature. Myanmar
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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The Chin, who live in the hills that border Bangladesh and India, like to say that Burmese literature was born from peace, while Chin literature was born from war. The first known Burmese text is the 12th Century Myazedi stone in Bagan, which lists the deeds and donations of a prince in memory of the love he held for his father and mother …
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Pu Loi Hom and Pu Loi Tun are two of the leading ethnic Shan writers. Here, they have rendered into faultless English, a collection of tales from their community which meanders through time and across different lands. Each oral tale imposes – as they were designed – its own moral lesson to the reader …
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Originally a publisher of respected literary fiction, the wife and husband team have expanded their business into a small, attractive bookshop. Though the bookshop is for Burmese readers and doesn’t sell English language books by Myanmar writers …
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Though Myanmar is overwhelmingly Buddhist, Christian writers have played a pivotal role in the direction and form of literature in the country. It was the American Baptists who introduced the first printing press to Myanmar …
continue readingDuwa Walu Sin Wa (b.1948) comes from a long line of Kachin ‘Jaiwa’s’ or storytellers. Born in Ninghpum Village, Sumprabum Township, the cultural heartland of the Jinghpaw community, his father, the head of his clan, sent Duwa Walu Sin Wa to live with his uncle when he was 10 years old. This uncle was the clan’s Jaiwa …
Continue reading “Writer Profile: Duwa Walu Sin Wa”
With such a high concentration of colonial era buildings it can be so easy to walk pass a building and be utterly unaware of its former significance to the city. The Guardian Press Building is made even more anonymous by relatively recent cladding which hides most of its prominent architectural structures making it appear as if it was only built in the 1990’s.
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The 12 poems from the eponymous title have been scoured from among many of Aung Cheimt’s works, dating back to 1995 and are thematically linked to seasons. Many are sparse, some just mere thoughts taken to paper, neither epic nor fantastical. Maung Tha Noe, once again, has proved his talents, in an effortless translation that reads smoothly and retains that firmness and determination of intent that Aung Cheimt is known for.
continue readingU Pe Myint (b.1949): Born in Rakhine State, U Pe Myint trained as a doctor but has won much acclaim as an influential figure in political journalism, fiction writing and translation. He has published over twenty-five books, including ‘Those Who Sell “Things” for Human Use and other stories’, a collection of short stories that …
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As the eponymous ‘k’ states in the prologue, this is not a book of his life but rather of Burma in the 1920’s, and yet it inevitably returns to him, and his family, his friends as they navigate a turbulent time in Myanmar, a time of literary renaissance and anti-colonial political awakenings …
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Billed as the biggest of its kind in South East Asia, Yangon Book Plaza is certainly large. Opened in 2017 by Myay Hmone Lwin, a writer and award winning publisher himself, the 20,000 square feet showcases nearly a dozen bookshops in an open plan floor area.
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The official organisation for publishers and booksellers in Myanmar, the MPBA grew out of the dissolution of the old, Ministry of Information controlled Myanmar Writer’s and Journalists Association in July 2012 …
continue readingKyaw Mya Than (1930 – 2000) was a novelist and non-fiction writer of the ‘realist’ tradition. In the 1950’s parliamentary era he wrote political articles under the pen name Ye Baw Than before joining the staff of ‘Crime Magazine’ in 1956, a popular journal at the time. He here found the theme that would become a constant in all his writing …
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Travel in Chin State and you are most likely heading towards the major towns, Falam and Hakha in the north, Mindat in the south (and if you are fortunate, Matupi in the centre). But these are mostly imperial constructions, enlarged by Christian missions and colonial trade with the valleys in Burma Proper below. The original clusters of the first chin communities are often found beyond the road.
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A slim tour of famous buildings and sites in Yangon. While there is a loose theme tying the book together – one of buildings and their purpose – the string is slack and fails to pull the seemingly arbitrary architectural samples in a coherent manner …
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Ko Harry’s, named after the taciturn owner, is a new edition to 37th street. After running a pallet stall on Pansodan for 10 years, and supported by friends in the book community Ko Harry opened his eponymous shop in late 2018.
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Mali Hpungtsi – Breeze over the Irrawaddy – is the longest running Jinghpaw language literary journal from Kachin State, in the far north of Myanmar …
continue readingRev. N-Gan Tang Gun is non-fiction writer, oral collector and academic born in Umhta Ga village, Sumprabum Township, the cultural triangle of the Kachin people in Kachin State to the north of Myanmar. Rev N-Gan Tang Gun has spent a lifetime in service of the church and education of the Kachin…
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Though there are many libraries in Yangon, the Pitaka Taik – three basket – library ranks as one of the most ornate.
Prime Minister U Nu, a devout Buddhist, convened the Sixth Great Buddhist Synod between 1954 and 1956 (the 5th was held in Mandalay a century earlier and resulted in the ‘world’s largest book’ at Kuthodaw Pagoda).
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Originally titled ‘War, Love and Prison’ in Burmese, the English title seems truer to the core beliefs of the author, a man known as an advocate for the working class …
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In late January 2019, the Tatmadaw took control of the remote Naga region headquarters of the National Socialist Council of Nagaland-Khaplang (NSCN-K), an ethnic armed organisation that has yet to sign the Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement. In March, 5 leaders of the NSCN-K were arrested by police in Khamti Township, Sagaing Division after attending a meeting at their liason office, a meeting organised by the Naga Culture Centre Committee to discuss peace in the Naga region …
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This is a fantastic, paid, opportunity for Burmese to English literary translators to work on a new collection of short stories from Myanmar. I have copied the announcement below from the collection’s editor, Alfred Birnbaum, but am wary of putting his private email contact address publicly. So if anyone is interested please just use the contact form on Sadaik and I will pass you onto Alfred …
continue readingPho Kyawt is an ethnic Rakhine writer, born in Kyaukphyu Township. He came to Yangon when he was 19 years old, working variously as a librarian and civil servant. He began to write seriously in 1960, publishing 57 novels mostly based on Arakanese history …
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A few months ago I made a brief post on the recipients of this year’s English PEN translation award winners, one of which was the successful funding of a new collection of short stories from Burma, edited by Alfred Birnbaum and to be published by Strangers Press in the UK …
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A collection of fifty short articles published in the mid to late 1960’s in the Working People’s Daily newspaper. While most anthologised articles from Myanmar rarely have a thematic identity, this particular collection, compiled by Win Pe’s son, is an extreme jumble of thoughts …
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With publishing power centres in Yangon and Mandalay, there are very few bookshops to be found in the smaller towns across the country. Kalaymyo, a former Shan town on the northern edge of the hills that mark the beginning of Chin State and only a couple of hours drive from Tamu on the Indian border is probably the last place you would expect to find a bookshop to rival any in Yangon.
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The Ta-ang are a Mon-Khmer group of thirteen communities who live in the hills of northern Shan state with their ancestral homeland centred on Namhsan, a stunning one road town that clings to the knuckle of a mountain overlooking steep, tea-leaf terraces …
continue readingMa Sandar is an architect by trade and a writer by choice. She made a name for herself with the publication of ‘Innocence of Youth’, a novel on the lives of students at the Yangon Institute of Technology in 1972. She has gone on to publish 50 short stories and 13 novels, winning 3 National Literary Awards in 1994, 1999 and 2002. 5 of her novels have been made into movies.
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The Kachin, an umbrella term for the six ethnic communities who live in Myanmar’s most northerly state, were once led by Duwas or clan chiefs. As well as governing their lands and the villages on it, the Duwa’s were also cultural guardians, commissioning Jaiwa’s – storytellers – to recount the epic oral myths and authorising the Manau celebrations.
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If ever there was a book which showed the world how to publish a translated work in minority, national and international languages, this is it. Written originally in Lai Hakha by the ethnic Chin poetess and creative polymath Anna Biak …
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One of my favourite bookshops in Myanmar, New Vision is the quintessential, tumble down second hand book store. The entrance is narrow and already framed with books. As you enter, the light dims and you are confronted by a wall of books.
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Literally in English, ‘Kachin Arts’, Wunpawng Shingni is Kachin State’s first independent, secular, multi-ethnic arts organisation. Residing in a two-storey wooden house in Myitkyina’s famed Manau Cultural Park, the whole organisation was formed in May 2013, taking advantage of the liberalising reforms of the Thein Sein administration …
continue readingU Win Pe is a prolific author, poet and journalist. Born in 1927 in the then Burmese capital Rangoon, raised further north in Monywa and attended primary school at the prestigious St Joseph boarding school in the colonial summer retreat town of Pyin Oo Lwin …
Continue reading “Writer Profile: U Win Pe”
This iconic hotel was built as a wooden boarding house by an Englishman and in 1901 sold to the Sarkie brothers, the famous Armenian hoteliers, who renovated it to the structure more or less how it is seen today. It soon became ‘the’ top hotel in the country and the first port of call for many writers who visited Burma, including George Orwell, Somerset Maugham, H.G.Wells, Noel Coward and Rudyard Kipling.
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Possibly the first novel written by a writer from an ethnic community, certainly to first to have been translated into English, The Lonely Land was originally written in the Lai Hakka language …
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Not quite a bookshop but rather a few racks of mixed books and magazines in the most prominent supermarket chain in Myanmar. Imagine a Tesco’s if someone had just thrown a bunch of randomn books onto a shelf and said ‘There you go.’
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One of the oft-ignored legacies of the conflicts in the Myanmar and the self-isolation of the country is the effect on the still nascent languages and literatures of the ethnic communities, many of who had only embraced a written language at the turn of the 20th Century …
continue readingSaw Khet is an ethnic Rakhine novelist. Born in Myepon Township in Rakhine state, he has spent his career in education as headmasters of various primary schools before retiring to Yangon in 2003 …
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Namhsan, a town in the hills of north eastern Shan State, has taken on an almost mythical status – at least among foreign writers – a town hidden among mountains, unreachable, a lawless place where anything can happen.
Some of that is partly true I guess.
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A 100 word summary just doesn’t seem enough to describe how important this book is. Though less than 50 pages long, the author, one of the most respected literary figures in the Kachin community, has demonstrated how oral legends and myths should not be relegated to a past that doesn’t concern us …
continue readingMra Hninzi is a renowned Burmese to English to Burmese translator. She was head of the foreign relations division at the department of immigration from 2000 – 2005, after she retired from government service she began her translation career. Her translated books include ‘A brief History of Globalisation’ by Phillippe Legrain (which won the Sarpay Beikmann translation award in 2005), the ‘Bonesetter’s Daughter’ by Amy Tan, ‘Small Miracles’ series by Yitta Halberstam and Judith Leventhal and Thant Myint U’s ‘River of Lost Footsteps’.
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Despite being a decade old, still the best English language collection of short stories from Myanmar available. Featuring over 20 celebrated writers including Journal Kyaw Ma Ma Lay, Nyi Pyu Lay, U Pe Myint, Khet Ma, Ma Sandar and Ma Ju among others. Ma Thanegi’s translation, as usual, is pitch perfect with each story accompanied by a colour illustration.
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Opened in the 1970s’, Bagan Book House is the mainstay of the famous 37th Book Street and has carved out its own niche with a collection dedicated solely to Myanmar in the English language …
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Far away from the publishing power centres in Mandalay and Yangon and only a three hour drive from the frontline of a malignant civil conflict Myitkyina, the capital of Kachin State in the far north of Myanmar is not where you would necessarily expect to find a thriving literary group …
continue readingSai Sang Pe is an ethnic Shan children’s writer and literary scholar. The author and designer of 8 children’s books in the Shan Gyi language, many of which aim to educate the Shan youth on drug awareness and health …
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Sitting in the shadow of the much larger and imposing Secretariat, it is easy to dismiss this two storey, red brick building as just another of the many abandoned and unloved heritage structures so common in Yangon. And yet (as is true for so many of these buildings) for over a century the Government Press has a long and important history …
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