Ludu U Hla

Ludu U Hla (; ; 19 January 1910 – 7 August 1982) was a Burmese journalist, publisher, chronicler, folklorist and social reformer whose prolific writings include a considerable number of path-breaking non-fiction works. He was married to fellow writer and journalist Ludu Daw Amar.

He collected oral histories from people in a diverse range of occupations which included a boatmaster on the Irrawaddy, a bamboo raftsman on the Salween, the keeper of a logging elephant, a broker for Steele Bros. (a large trading company during the colonial period), a gambler on horses, a bureaucrat and a reporter. These were published in a series of books titled "I the ------".

A library of 43 volumes of folk tales, a total of 1597 stories, that he collected between 1962 and 1977 from most of the ethnic minorities of Burma was a truly Herculean undertaking. Many of these have been translated into several languages. There are 5 other volumes of folktales from around the world to his credit.

During the U Nu era of parliamentary democracy, he spent over three years in Rangoon Central Jail as a political prisoner after publishing a controversial news story in his Mandalay newspaper Ludu (The People). Whilst in prison he interviewed several inmates and wrote their life stories as told in the first person narrative, the best known collection of which was published in The Caged Ones; it won the UNESCO award for literature in 1958, and has been translated into English.

Kyipwayay U Hla Born in Pazun Myaung village near Nyaunglebin in Lower Burma, and educated at the Rangoon Government High School, by the age of 20, U Hla had secured a valuer's position with the Rangoon Municipal Corporation; the Depression had hit Burma culminating in a peasant uprising and the founding of the nationalist Dobama Asiayone (We Burmans Association). He joined the Lungemya Kyipwayay Athin (Progress for Youth Club) which started as the Friendly Correspondence Club cum debating society among high school students in 1926, and his high-minded reformist zeal for all-round betterment of the country's youth had remained a lifelong passion since. He also wrote articles assuming the pen names Kyipwayay Maung Hla and Maung Kan Kaung. He invited on board upcountry writers such as Shwe Kaingtha (a monk from Sagaing and former archaeologist who was already one of the Kyipwayay regulars under the name Yadanabon Hpo Hmatsu) and Marla, an old school friend of Amar, in addition to the usual stable of writers such as Maha Swe, Zawgyi, Min Thu Wun, Theippan Maung Wa, Zawana, Maung Hpyuu and Maung Htin. who also translated "The Rainbow" (Thettant yaung) by the Polish Communist writer Wanda Wasilewska in 1945.

Both U Hla and Daw Amar became involved in the Resistance movement; they formed the Asha Lu Nge (Asia Youth) in Mandalay, ostensibly to collaborate with the Japanese, and engaged mainly in rescue and sanitation operations, but it became a ready source of young Resistance fighters for Bohmu Ba Htoo in Upper Burma.

It has been said that, in the history of Burmese literature, no other writer has been as prolific as U Hla. Ludu Daw Amar (b. 1915) died recently on 7 April 2008 at the age of 93.

Ludu U Hla was a prime example of what an individual could achieve in a lifetime for the common good, although he would be the first to condemn one-upmanship. History is full of able men who fell by the wayside and lost sight of their own goals and forsook their own principles and convictions. U Hla was of the people, for the people, and never abandoned the people he loved and set out to serve from a very young age. To paraphrase one of his younger colleagues, Ludu Sein Win, even though U Hla had never taken up arms in the revolutionary struggle from colonial times, for he had such great compassion, and if his far-sightedness and forbearance were seen as ineptitude by young radicals, he was a "saintly revolutionary", to be compared with China's Lu Hsun, though not a revolutionary saint.