Ma Thida is a medical doctor, writer, human rights activist, and former prisoner of conscience. She has published over two dozen books in Burmese and several in English, including The Roadmap, Prisoner of Conscience: My Steps through Insein and A-Maze: Myanmar’s Struggle for Democracy, 2011-2023. Sentenced to 20 years in prison for her activism in 1993, she was released in 1999. Ma Thida has received multiple international human rights awards, including the Reebok Human Rights Award (1996), the PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award (1996), the Freedom of Speech Award from the Norwegian Writers’ Union (2011), and Vaclav Havel’s Disturbing the Peace and Courageous Writer at Risk Awards (2016). From 2008 to 2010, she was a Fellow at Brown University and Harvard University. She served as the first president of PEN Myanmar in 2013 and has been a board member of PEN International. Currently, she chairs the Writers in Prison Committee of PEN International. After leaving Myanmar in 2021, she was at the Southeast Asia Studies Council at Yale University (2021-22) and became a fellow at Martin Roth Initiatives in Berlin (2022-23) and finally a scholar at the Writer-in-Exile program with PEN Germany since 2023.
