Khin Aung Aye Myanmar

Khin Aung Aye (b. 1956) was born and raised in Rangoon, where he attended the university. He has published 11 collections of poetry, which include collaborations with leading Burmese poets and translators such as Zeyar Lynn and his own cousin and early teacher Maw Rousseau. His first book was Time Train from the World's Shore. His early collections were somewhat traditional in approach, being exemplified by four-syllable metered verse, but steadily became more influenced by modernism. Nowadays, he is regarded as one of the key post-modern and pioneering poets to emerge from the Khitsan ('testing the times') era of Burmese poetry. However, he stresses that his writing style emerged from close readings of old Burmese masters like Dagon Taya and - in the 1980s - through the workshops of Maung Tha Noe. His collection, 54 Sentences Dictated by Free Thought, was published in 2011. Khin Aung Aye lives in Bangkok, but is known outside South East Asia from readings in England, Germany, Finland and at literary festivals in South Korea.

(2012)