Ma Thida studied medicine in the early 1980s earning a degree in surgery, and also took up writing at a young age. In fact, she was actively supporting
Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel laureate and founder of the main opposition party in Burma. She served nearly six years in unhealthy, mostly solitary conditions. She contracted tuberculosis without adequate access to medical care. In 1996 she received the award of year's
PEN/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write while she was still in prison. From 2008 to 2010, she lived in the US as an International Writers Project Fellow at
Brown University and a Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at
Harvard University. In 2016, the English translation of her prison memoir
Sanchaung, Insein, Harvard was published as
Prisoner of Conscience: My Steps through Insein. She was honored with the 2016 'Disturbing the Peace' award given by the
Vaclav Havel Library Foundation, for her humanitarian values and for having suffered unjust persecution for her beliefs. In 2016, she was elected to the board of PEN International at 82nd PEN International Congress held in Galician, Spain. She was previously president of
PEN Myanmar. She is the chair of the Writer in prison committee of PEN International. She left Myanmar in 2021, soon after the military seized power in a coup. ==Works==