Writer Profile: Khin Pann Hnin
Khin Pann Hnin (d. 2017) was a writer, doctor and journalist born in the delta town of Myaung Mya, Irrawaddy Division. Though her writing career started while she was a young woman with poems published in university journals, she embarked on a different path (as so many writers in Myanmar do), as a doctor …
She continued to write and publish two short story collections, The Walkers and Age Poem and Other Stories, as well as two novels The Far End of the Clouds and Dreams of a Heartbeat Garden. A story, Zero Degree Centigrade was translated into Japanese by the Daido Foundation.
In the 1980s she was posted to Lashio, in the north-east of Shan State, a location that featured in her story, A Pledge of Love to the Malikha River, published in the Hidden Words, Hidden Worlds anthology. Her medical career ended after she treated victims of the 1988 revolution and she was dismissed from her post. She retrained as a journalist, attending workshops in Cambodia, eventually finding employment as the Cultural Editor of the government Union Daily, a position many writers condemned her for.
During her life she received many accolades including being voted one of Myanmars top 50 Women in 2013. She was a widely respected writer, popular among readers for her romance narratives, her final work before she passed away, was a chapbook of romance poems published by Seikku Cho Cho in 2015.
*This is the fourth in a series of adapted profiles on writers taken from the 2017 anthology Hidden Words Hidden Worlds: Contemporary Short Stories from Myanmar