Ma Thida

Education

Ma Thida studied medicine in the early 1980s earning a degree in surgery, and also took up writing at a young age.

Career

She has published under the pseudonym Suragamika which means "brave traveler". In Myanmar, Thida is best known as a leading intellectual, whose books deal with the country"s political situation. She has worked as an editor at a Burmese monthly youth magazine and a weekly newspaper.

She said, "I wanted to become a writer because I want to share what I observe around me, like poverty." Her interest in health care developed after falling ill as a child.

She served nearly six years in unhealthy, mostly solitary conditions. She contracted tuberculosis without adequate access to medical care.

She was released due to declining health, increasing political pressure and the efforts of human rights organizations like Amnesty International and Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists association International. Later she chaired the Pen Myanmar.

From 2008 to 2010, she lived in the United States as an International Writers Project Fellow at Brown University and a Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University.

Her first book was The Sunflower, which was only released in Burma in 1999, as it was banned upon international release in the early 1990s. The book argues that the Burmese people have high expectations of democracy icon Suu Kyi that made her "a prisoner of applause." The Roadmap (2012) is a fictional story based on events in Burmese politics from 1988 to 2009. The Myanmar-language book Sanchaung, Insein, Harvard is a memoir, as the title suggests, about her early life in Sanchaung, imprisonment in Insein, and time in the United States.

Achievements

• In October 1993, she was sentenced to 20 years in Insein Prison for "endangering public peace, having contact with illegal organisations, and distributing unlawful literature." In fact, she was actively supporting Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel laureate and founder of the main opposition party in Burma. During this time she was awarded several international human rights awards, including the Reebok Human Rights Award (1996) and the Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists association/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award (1996).