In 2023, PEN America labels Myanmar ‘the world’s worst jailer of writers’. It might well be also called ‘the world’s worst book banner’.
Under Aung San Suu Kyi’s nearly 10 years rule, as the military stepped back, the democratic experiment led to some freedom of expression, albeit ‘with the persistence of taboo issues, such as the plight of ethnic minorities’ (RSF, 2026). In the wake of the 2021 military coup strict censorship was re-imposed. Myanmar Junta resorts to three book censoring motives: LGBTQIA+ themes, the Rohingya massacre, and any book deemed harmful to the Junta’s ideology. According to Radio Free Asia, the prohibitions affect local and foreign literature alike on the grounds of being ‘obscene’ or ‘socially unacceptable’ (January 2025).
Four of the seven LGBTQIA+ themed books banned in 2025 are: Aung Khant’s A Butterfly Rests on My Heart, Mahura’s 1500 Miles to You and Love Planted by Hate, Vivian’s Concerned Person U Wai. Then, there was the threat to suspend local bookstores distributing Ronan Lee’s Myanmar’s Rohingya Genocide: Identity, History and Hate Speech (2021). An ex-Queensland Parliamentarian, a member of the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS), Irish-Australian Lee gathered irrefutable evidence of the 2017 genocide in this collection of witness interviews.
Publishers can only publish books after they have been cleared by the Press Scrutiny and Registration Division (PSRB) of the Ministry of Information – a process similar to the one we noted in PEN Perth March newsletter about banned books in Iran. Otherwise, their licence will be withdrawn as happened to Lwin Oo Sarpay Publishing House in 2022 for importing and distributing Ronan Lee’s evidence of the Rohingya genocide. This was the third such closure, following the Junta shutting down two other publishing houses, Shwe Lat & Yan Aung Sarpay, and the Win To Aung printing press, for issuing books critical of the regime.
With regards to literature, whereas heavy censorship occurred during the British colonisation and in the immediate post-colonial era as described in Anna Allot’s Inked over, ripped out: Burmese storytellers and the censors (1994), I was unable to find much documentation in English on banned literary books in Myanmar. Human rights organisations have their hands full keeping abreast of journalists’ lack of freedom to express themselves, which they do at the cost of their own freedom, if not their lives. Now, censorship, and likely self-censorship, of Burmese writers (apart from the above LGBTQIA+ novels) flies under the radar.
penperth.com 