2010 Finalist

Burmese Lessons: A Love Story

by Karen Connelly

When Karen Connelly travelled to Burma in the mid-1990s, she planned merely to write a series of articles about an imprisoned dissident. Instead, she found herself writing a harrowing account of life under Burma's military dictatorship - the terror, the treachery, the brutality, but also the astonishingly resilient serenity, camaraderie and fatalism of the Burmese people. In the process, Connelly was forced to confront some of the most troubling questions any political writer must inevitably face: where is the line between being an observer and a participant, and what needs to be protected most: one's public writing or one's private life. An insightful, riveting book.



Karen Connelly at the presentation ceremony, January 15, 2010.