Frontline Poets: The Literary Rebels Taking on Myanmar's Military (book talk)

In Myanmar, poetry and popular uprisings have long been intertwined, from anti-colonial movements to pro-democracy protests. But who are the poets? Why have they played such a unique role throughout Myanmar’s history? And why does poetry still resonate in Myanmar's political scene while it fades into irrelevance elsewhere? The forthcoming "Frontline Poets: The Literary Rebels Taking on Myanmar's Military" by Aung Naing Soe and Joe Freeman seeks to answer these questions, while also featuring many extraordinary but sorely overlooked Burmese poems published in original English translations for the first time.

In a work of narrative non-fiction published by River Books, "Frontline Poets" explores these topics through detailed profiles of five Myanmar poets. Intermixed with poems, illustrations and photography, the book charts their paths from youthful bards to the dramatic upheaval after the 2021 Myanmar coup, while documenting how they responded differently to seismic events in life and on the page.

Chair and Author Biographies:

Aung Naing Soe is a Burmese filmmaker and journalist. As a Hubert H. Humphrey Fellow at Arizona State University, he covered immigration, the coronavirus outbreak, and the Black Lives Matter movement. In 2020, he went home for the general election and witnessed the military coup. He now covers civil unrest in Myanmar from his base in Thailand.

Joe Freeman is an American writer and researcher who has worked across Southeast Asia for more than a decade, reporting from Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia and the Philippines. From 2017-2020, he was the Southeast Asia correspondent for Agence France-Presse. Since 2021, he has worked for Amnesty International’s regional office, with a focus on Myanmar. 

Prof. John Sidel is Director of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, and the Sir Patrick Gillam Professor of International and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Professor Sidel received his BA and MA from Yale University and his PhD from Cornell University. He is the author of Capital, Coercion, and Crime: Bossism in the Philippines (1999), Philippine Politics and Society in the Twentieth Century: Colonial Legacies, Postcolonial Trajectories (2000), Riots, Pogroms, Jihad: Religious Violence in Indonesia (2006), The Islamist Threat in Southeast Asia: A Reassessment (2007), Thinking and Working Politically in Development: Coalitions for Change in the Philippines (2020, with Jaime Faustino) and Republicanism, Communism, Islam: Cosmopolitan Origins of Revolution in Southeast Asia (2021).

This event is supported by the London Burma Reading Group.