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Pascal Khoo Thwe | |
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| Born | 1967 (age 57–58) Pekon, Shan State, Burma |
| Alma mater | Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Awards | Kiriyama Prize |
Pascal Khoo Thwe (born 1967) [1] is a Burmese author from the minority Padaung people, [2] known for his autobiographic writings about growing up in Myanmar under military rule. [3] His 2002 memoir, From the Land of Green Ghosts: A Burmese Odyssey, was awarded the Kiriyama Prize. [4]
Thwe was born in Pekon, Shan State, Burma (today called Myanmar).[ citation needed ]
By a chance encounter with John Casey, a Cambridge don, Thwe was rescued[ when? ] from the jungles of Burma, where he and other student refugees were fighting Burmese soldiers for independence. In 1991, he enrolled at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he received his BA in English literature in 1995. His 2002 autobiographical book, From the Land of Green Ghosts: A Burmese Odyssey, [5] was published by Harper-Collins in 2002.
An autobiography, sometimes informally called an autobio, is a self-written biography of one's own life.
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This is an introduction to some of the books and novels written about Southeast Asia.
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The Kiriyama Prize was an international literary award awarded to books about the Pacific Rim and South Asia. Its goal was to encourage greater understanding among the peoples and nations of the region. Established in 1996, the prize was last awarded in 2008.
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John Casey is a British academic and a writer for The Daily Telegraph. He has been described as "mentor" to Roger Scruton and is a former lecturer in English at the University of Cambridge and a former lecturer and a Life Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. In 1975, along with Scruton, he founded the Conservative Philosophy Group. Though not a member of Peterhouse, he has been considered part of the Cambridge Right, which included scholars from Selwyn College, Gonville and Caius College and Christ's College as well. He was editor of The Cambridge Review between 1975 and 1979.
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Shelby Tucker was a dual-national American and British lawyer and journalist, and the author of: (1) Among Insurgents: Walking Through Burma, the story of his trek from China to India through the Kachin highlands of northern Burma; (2) Burma: The Curse of Independence, a 'plain man's guide' to Burma's perennial strife; (3) The Last Banana: Dancing with the Watu, about David Livingstone's quest for 'God's highway', the role of the Greeks in bringing the 'three Cs' to Tanganyika, and Tucker's African travels; (4) Client Service, a satirical novel about an offshore financial company, drawn from a moment in the sixties when Tucker was a 'financial counsellor' for Bernie Cornfeld's notorious Investors Overseas Services; and (5) Poetry and Thinking of the Chagga, a translation of a German missionary's study of the beliefs and customs of the Chagga peoples of German East Africa that had been published in 1909.
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