Mike Allen and Nay Phone Latt

Tonight PEN will honor Nay Phone Latt, a young Burmese blogger who is serving a twelve-year sentence in a remote and harsh prison for using his blog and the Rangoon Internet cafés he owned to spread news about the street demonstrations that peacefully challenged Burma's military regime in 2007. I wanted to meet Nay Phone Latt when I travelled to Burma in early 2008, but he'd already been arrested. I met other young bloggers, journalists, and activists who knew him. They were almost painfully ...