Lucas Stewart's Blog, page 7

Siyin Literature Dedication

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.

While the first scripts in the Chin dialects, Siyin, Lai Hakha and others, were created by officers in the invading British army at the turn of the 20th Ce...

Sadaik Shorts: Shan Legends

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, yet the direction of the tale, its purpose, its origin and importantly its source, shrewdly referenced at the book’s end, tie the stories to a much more modern world, one which many of the pol...

Exploring Burma’s Bookshops: Kant kaw Wut Yee

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, it’s worth checking out just to see the quality of independent bookshops in the city (and the contemporary state of literature itself).  One of the owners, Ma Waing Waing is a former secretary of the Myanmar Publishers and Booksellers Association an...

# 11 – Christian Artists Forum

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.  Missionaries are responsible for many of the ethnic communities script design.  The first true novel in the Burmese language was written by a Karen Christian, James Hla Gyaw.  Bhamaw Tin Aung, the 1950’s novelist and thorn in the side of both U Nu and Ne Win was an ethn...

Duwa Walu Sin Wa – Storyteller to Clan Chief

Duwa 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.  As his uncle spoke in an unknown tongue when telling these stories at times of celebration, Duwa would translate for the villages, committing the stories to memory himself. ...

Guardian Press Building

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.

And yet this now unprepossessing building has a remarkable history.

The Bangladeshi writer and Nobel laureate, Rabindranath Tagore ma...

Sadaik Shorts: 12 Poems

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.

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Title: 12 Poems – Collection (4)

Author: Aung Cheimt,

Translator:...

U Pe Myint -Short Stories and Politics

U 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 won the 1995 National Literary Award.  In 2007 he won the respected Shwe Literary Award for a collection of essays titled ‘Let there be no learning, no reading and no b...

Sadaik Shorts: Myanmar in my Lifetime

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.  Introspective, emotive, poetic, at times comedic and forever fascinating, this is how a moment in a young life should be recorded.  If only this book was more widely known and read in English, it would...

Exploring Burma’s Bookshops: Myanmar Book Plaza

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.

The plaza can be hard to find, but if you take the larger entrance on Lanmadaw street rather than the smaller one on 17th, go right up the stairs to the fifth floor (above the snooker table seller and the haunted floor which has nothing...