Nu Nu Yi Inwa

Smile As They Bow, 2007 Shortlist

Nu Nu Yi Inwa is a Burmese author born in 1957 in the village of Inwa near Mandalay (as Burmese customarily have no surnames, she affixes the place 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’s) leading writers, she currently resides in Yangon (Rangoon), although her writings are more often set among the rural poor and social outcasts. She has travelled abroad only briefly: to the Oxford University Centre for Cross-Cultural Research on Women and 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 in Thai border areas. 

Smile As They Bow unfolds during the week-long Taungbyon Festival held near Mandalay to propitiate the Burmese spirits known as nats, and follows an elder gay transvestite medium who fears losing his much younger partner to a woman in the heat of the festivities.

Translators

Alfred Birnbaum & Thi Thi Aye

Publisher

Hyperion (Hardcover)