Lucas Stewart's Blog, page 13

# 2 – Kayan Literature and Culture Committee

The Kayan Lawi are a sub-community from Kayah State on Myanmar’s eastern border with Thailand, recognised for the tradition of wearing brass coils around their necks and knees (and the origin of the shameful moniker ‘giraffe-necks’).  Despite their presence in Kayah State, the KLCC is actually headquartered in Pekhon, Southern Shan State.  A legacy of the colonial redrawing of the map which splintered ethnic communities from ancestral lands and placed them in administrative divisions of which...

Maung Khine Zaw

Maung Khine Zaw is a non-fiction writer and author of two books on Yangon.  In the 1990’s he contributed articles on the city to ‘Myolaw (City) Magazine’ published by the Yangon City Development Committee.  These articles were republished in book form titled, ‘Account of the Past in the City and its Suburbs’ by Gonhto Sarpay (2nd Ed. 2013).  He later wrote for the ‘Traveller Weekly journal’, where his English language articles were published by Thuriya Sarpay as ‘Interesting Places of the Pas...

Mandalay Cultural Museum

Though many of the museums in Myanmar have suffered from decades of neglect and underfunding, Mandalay Cultural Museum does hold a few literary gems:

The Yadanabon Gazette: In 1854 Mandalay, King Mindon, a reformer of sorts and fully aware of the technological superiority of the invading British Forces to the south, commissioned the first Burmese language newspaper, the Yadanabon Gazette.  An American owned printing press was sailed up the Irrawaddy and supervised, appropriately enough, by Ah...

Sadaik Shorts: Pieces and Mixed

This was a difficult book to read.  As the title suggests, the pieces are mixed, meandering from barely contained rage to almost unintelligible thoughts.  The verses are short, often too short.  Many just mere scatterings of words.  Some are profound, a memory of the dates of political awakenings while others seem included simply to fill a page.  The bi-lingual translation is appreciated, to see the two scripts side by side where they belong, but there is an inescapable ‘thinness’, to both th...

Exploring Burma’s Bookshops: Sarpay Beikmann

There seems to be uncertainty as to when the Sarpay Beikman bookshop began.  As the book-selling arm of the Burma Translation Society which was renamed to Sarpay Beikmann (House of Literature) either somewhere between 1954 and 1962, it has always been owned by the state, whether that be the U Nu parliamentary democracy state, the Ne Win socialist regime, the Than Shwe military regime, the Thein Sein transitional state or the as yet to be coined NLD era.  The shop is currently under the superv...

# 1 – Kayah Nationalities Literacy and Culture Committee

The Kayah Li, or Red Kayah, are the largest of the possible nine ethnic communities that make up Kayah State, the smallest of Myanmar’s ethnic states, along the eastern border with Thailand.

Formed in 1979 or 1980 by the father of the current (2019) chairman, Plu Reh, the KNLCC have operated more or less underground and within Karenni IDP camps along the Thai border until the Kayah State government, under former president Thein Sein, finally allowed them to establish a physical and legal pres...

James Hla Gyaw

Despite his prominence as the author of the first true novel in the Burmese language, too little is known of James Hla Gyaw’s life.

He was born on the 21st June 1866 in Shwegyin in Bago Region to Buddhist parents who died when he was just a child.  Adopted by his aunt, he converted to Christianity along with the rest of his family and was sent to Yangon, the new capital of British Burma for his education.  Attending St John’s College he studied the English language and literature, two fields...

PEN Translates Award For New Burmese Story Anthology

Yezet, an anthology of soon-to-be published Burmese short stories is one of 16 recipients of the most recent round of grants from the PEN Translates awards in the UK.

The PEN Translates award are given by English PEN to encourage publishers in the UK to discover and publish literature from other languages by offering grants to cover the costs of the translation.   The award is open to any UK based publisher and for any work of literature (non-fiction, poetry, short stories and novels) and are...

Sorrento Villa

I’ve always admired this building.  Perhaps because it stands so out of place in the curve of one of the city’s largest roundabouts, far from the downtown townships, where the crush of so many colonial era buildings can often minimise their grandeur.

Though the exact date of its construction is unknown, as is the original owner, the Sorrento Villa seems to have a century long connection to literature.  It is possible the villa was the 1930’s home, at least for a short while, to the journalist...

Sadaik Shorts: A Garden on a Far Flung Peak

An unnamed, newly promoted headmaster attempts to build a ‘perfect school’ in a village in the northern Chin Hills.  As with a lot of ‘realist’ fiction from Myanmar, this novel reads like a memoir: characters come and go with little development, there is no plot to speak of, merely a recurring list of happenings.  Nevertheless, the novel does contain some bright passages and Nyi Nyi Pe’s translation, while perhaps too faithful to the text, is certainly readable.

(Sadaik Shorts is a series of...