In an interview on Burma

Two of the books on your list, The River of Lost Footsteps and The Land of the Green Ghosts, are written by Burmese authors, the first being the grandson of a late UN Secretary General, U Thant.

Yes and while The River of Lost Footstepscomes from an elite perspective, the other book comes from the other end of the spectrum. The Land of the Green Ghosts is one of the best books I have read on Burma in recent years. Pascal comes from the Padaung people, the ‘long-necked Karen’ as they are also known. The background is that he was a working as a waiter in a Mandalay teashop and he met this English academic. They started discussing James Joyce and the Englishman asked him about Ulysses but Pascal had never heard of it. Such was his hunger for literature that he had picked up old books around Mandalay market – he had happened to find Finnegans Wake, and liked it.

Pascal took part in the 1988 uprising and then escaped to Thailand and from there made it to the UK. He went to Cambridge where he read English literature; he learned to write very well in English and came out with this fantastic book....

Which in a way is about the discovery of literature?

Yes, but also it is about his people, this small, almost forgotten tribe. There is a very moving scene in the book, where someone wants to show him a little statuette he bought of what he thought was an African princess, a person with a long neck adorned with rings. The collector also had some idea that it may have been Burmese. This statuette turned out to be Pascal’s grandmother. She had been taken to the UK in a freak show in the 1930s, where she had been paraded around for a few months.

Pascal remembered his grandmother talking about her trip to England. The book is full of interesting anecdotes and humour. For instance, the Padaung are Roman Catholics because some Italian missionaries on their way to China got stuck there. When the Padaung saw them they thought they were some type of pig, and put them in a pigpen. They realised that these were humans, with some knowledge and the Padaung thought: ‘Maybe we can learn something from them.’ The missionaries were released and all the Padaungs became Roman Catholics, with names like Pascal and Antonio.

In an interview on Describing Burma

Tell me about From the Land of Green Ghosts

This is very interesting, very poetically written, and it’s a true story. Pascal Koo Thwe is from the Padang tribes, somewhere north of Mandalay – not quite the Shan States, but certainly up there. The Padang are famous because they have the giraffe-necked women. He went to Mandalay University and got caught up in the 1988 student revolution and the protests, and had to race off, and his girlfriend was caught and raped and killed by the army, so he had to live in hiding in the forest.

Before that, though, when he was a student he worked as a waiter, and in this restaurant he struck up a relationship with John Casey, who was an English professor who used to visit Burma. They started to write to each other and miraculously the letters got through when Pascal Koo Thwe was living in the forest. Casey suggested he come and study, and got him a place at Caius College, Cambridge to read English literature. Pascal Koo Thwe became kind of Casey’s mission: Casey wanted to save him because he was intelligent, and he offered him the place at Cambridge and paid for him and everything. But although they let Pascal leave the country, he wasn’t allowed to come back.

Like Aung San Suu Kyi?

Exactly. He writes beautifully about growing up in Burma and these lovely descriptions of his childhood among the long-necked women, and then these awful things that happened to him and how he went to the forests with the Karen tribes and lived on the front line as a partisan. And then he writes about his life in England and it’s fascinating. I’m not sure Pascal Koo Thwe is very happy or fulfilled because I feel that if you’re Burmese and you want to do something you should be there somehow.