INTRODUCTION
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In March 1917, in Yangon, the first issue of Thuriya magazine published what is widely regarded as the first short story in Myanmar. Burmese literature is not so young of course, with a nearly thousand-year lineage of soldier-poetry, court dramas and religious tales to look back on; but the printing of ‘Maung Thein Tin and Ma Thein Shin wuthu’ by Shwe U Daung set in motion an extraordinary rise, then fall, of the Burmese short story. From the unfettered experimentation of the 1920s and 30s Khitsan (‘Testing Times’) movement to the post-colonial introspection of the 1950s and national laureate Dagon Tarya’s New Literature movement, writers embraced the short story. Under the socialist military regime in the 1960s, writers became ‘literary workers’, tasked with upholding the national character, while works deemed unsuitable for this purpose, such as horror stories, were banned. The 1970s saw the editors of the influential Moe Way journal make their mark on a new generation of writers just as they confronted a deepening suppression of their craft. A brief interlude of freedom enjoyed after the 1988 revolution made way for the 1990s, where the short story form had become largely ossified – though still widely popular – and constrained by the rigours of censorship. Writers continued to write, and continued to be jailed, a sword of Damocles hanging over every word until finally, in August
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