Ko Ko Thett

Ko Ko Thett (Burmese: ကိုကိုသက်; stylised as ko ko thett; born in 1972 in Rangoon) is a poet, poetry translator and editor based in Norwich, United Kingdom.[1][2] Ko Ko Thett has published poetry collections, anthologies and translations in both Burmese and English.[1] In 1993, Ko Ko Thett enrolled in Yangon Institute of Technology, where he began publishing samizdat poems.[3] He was detained in 1996 for his involvement in the December 1996 student uprising.[2] Upon his release in April 1997, he left the country for Singapore, and worked for humanitarian organizations in Bangkok (Thailand) and in Europe. He read political science and cultural anthropology at universities in Helsinki (Finland), Vienna (Austria) and Leuven (Belgium).[2] In 2012, he won the 2012 English PEN Writers in Translation Programme Award for Bones will Crow, an anthology of 15 contemporary Burmese poets, he co-edited with James Byrne.[4][2] After a writer residency in the United States in 2017 he returned to Myanmar. From 2012 to 2020, Ko Ko Thett was country editor for Myanmar at Poetry International, and from 2017 to 2022, poetry editor for Mekong Review. Ko Ko Thett’s poems have appeared in Ambit, Asia Literary Review, Bengal Lights, Cyphers, Daedalus, Granta, Griffith Review, PN Review, Poetry London, Portside Review, The Margins, Tripwire, Usawa Literary Review, Washington Square Review, and World Literature Today, among others.