Nu Nu Yi

About the Author

Nu Nu Yi was born in 1957 in the village of Inwa near Mandalay; as Burmese customarily have no surnames, she affixes the village name as an identifying part of her pen name. Since her debut in 1984, she has written over fifteen novels, a hundred short stories, and various diaristic magazine articles. Now one of Myanmar’s (Burma) leading writers, she currently resides in Yangon (Rangoon), although her writings are more often set among the rural poor and social outcasts. She has traveled abroad only briefly: once to the Oxford University Centre for Cross-Cultural Research on Women and once to the University of Iowa’s International Writers’ Program, as well as working with BBC World Radio in Chiang Mai to script Burmese language radio plays to promote HIV/AIDS awareness. Translators:
Thi Thi Aye was born in 1966 in Yangon (Rangoon), but raised in Wazi and Mandalay. She has been living abroad since 2001, first in Seattle and now in Tokyo, writing articles for Burmese magazines about various experiences in the “outside world.” This is her first published team translation in English.
Alfred Birnbaum, born in 1955 in Washington DC, has lived over half his life in Japan. He began translating professionally in 1980 on subjects in Japanese art, architecture, design and contemporary fiction. Between 1993-1996, he studied Burmese at SOAS (Univ of London) and at the Institute of Foreign Languages (Yangon Univ), then lived in Yangon (Rangoon) from 1996 to 2001. He currently resides in Tokyo.