Myanmar: Turning the Page
Insight Myanmar
“Even before the coup, books gave me ideas, empathy, and hope,” Zu May Lwin, a student activist and library organizer from Magway, tells the Insight Myanmar Podcast. Her work includes grassroots literacy work and the creation of mobile libraries for displaced communities and political protest; which culminated in her arrest and imprisonment at the hands of the military regime. In this conversation, she argues that education and access to books are essential not only for individual growth but also for rebuilding Myanmar’s society after authoritarian repression.
Zu May Lwin explains that before the 2021 coup, reading culture in many parts of Myanmar faced structural challenges that limited access to books and discouraged widespread reading habits. In Magway, a regional capital city, books were often physically difficult to obtain, and their cost placed them out of reach for many ordinary families. People spent long days working to sustain their livelihoods, leaving little time or energy for reading. In this environment, reading rarely became a social norm passed between generations. Many young people did not receive guidance about which books mattered or how reading could shape their thinking. Formal schooling introduced literature only superficially through textbooks, and classrooms often treated reading as a requirement rather than an invitation to intellectual exploration. As a result, many students finished school without developing a meaningful relationship with books.
Originally a chemistry student, she had developed a personal love of reading during her teenage years, and that interest gradually expanded into community engagement. After finishing high school, she volunteered with a mobile library initiative in Magway that sought to bring books directly to public spaces. Rather than waiting for readers to visit traditional libraries, volunteers transported collections of books to parks and university campuses. Every Sunday, they spread books across the ground in a public park, inviting anyone passing by to browse and borrow them. The program also traveled to university campuses, where students from different institutions gathered to borrow books and return them the following week. Through these activities, the mobile library became more than a distribution system for books; it functioned as a community gathering place that encouraged discussion, curiosity, and collective learning.
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