Thi Mar Win is from Shwebo, Sagaing Region of Upper Burma. Her family moved to Mandalay when she was eighteen. In the early 2000s, as a student at Yezin Agriculture University in central Myanmar, she started writing poems, essays and short stories for campus magazines, pamphlets and wall newspapers under a penname. Her poems were shared only among intimate friends until the release of her 2003 campus chapbook Exhibition of the Pains of Winter Birds.
After graduating from Yezin with a degree in agriculture economics in 2005, Thi Mar Win kept her poems to herself again while working as a researcher for various civil society organizations in Myanmar. In 2013, Thi Mar Win burst onto the Burmese poetry scene with the publications of two chapbooks, Wild Grass and Being Poetry (May 2013) and Don’t Sign on this Nostalgia . . . Being Poetry (September 2013), both from Kyaw Hmway Books, Yangon. She rarely writes for Burmese magazines but since her poem ‘Nutrition Index with the Promise of Hunger’ in Tharapu Magazine (September 2013), her poems have been sporadically seen in Burmese magazines. Her most recent work, ‘Am I a Samurai or A Golden Padauk Flower’, published by The Era in Yangon in November 2014, continues to display her signature mix of poignant lyricism and romanticism.
Currently Thi Mar Win is a student at the Graduate School of Bioresources and Bioenvironment in Kyushu University, Japan.
Bibliography
Poetry chapbooks
Exhibition of the Pains of Winter Birds, 2003
Wild Grass and Being Poetry, Yangon, Kyaw Hmway Books, May 2013
Don’t Sign on this Nostalgia . . . Being Poetry, Kyaw Hmway Books, Yangon, September 2013
