Khin Aung Aye was born in 1956 in Rangoon where he was raised and attended the university. He has published 11 collections of poetry, which include collaborations with leading poets and translators from Burma, like Zeyar Lynn and his own cousin and early teacher Maw Rousseau. Time Train from the World's Shore was his first book and his early collections reveal a somewhat more traditional approach to poetry—exemplified by four-syllable metered verse—steadily becoming more influenced by modernism. Nowadays, Khin Aung Aye is regarded as one of the key postmodern and pioneering poets, to emerge from the Khit San (‘testing the times’) era of Burmese poetry. However, he stresses that his style as a writer emerged from close readings of the old masters in Burma, like Dagon Taya and—in the 1980s—through the workshops of Maung Tha Noe. His latest collection, 54 Sentences Dictated by Free Thought, was published in Yangon in summer 2011. He lives in Bangkok, but is known to audiences outside of South East Asia having recently read his work in England, Germany, Finland and at literary festivals in South Korea. Khin Aung Aye is known to provide the date and time of his more recent poems and his selection is intended to reflect something of that chronology.
