Lucas Stewart explores the contemporary landscape of literature in Myanmar, engaging and working with censored and jailed writers, publishers and booksellers. His travels took him to the ethnic states of Burma which, little known to outsiders and even the urban Burmese, harbour a cultural and artistic legacy where literature is a means of identification, and of separation from each other and from the cities.

In a five year journey all across Myanmar, Lucas Stewart travels from Yangon in the south to the northern limits of Kachin State in search of the literary luminaries of the country’s recent past. He bonds with censored and jailed writers, poets, publishers and booksellers, recording their stories of heritage and resilience. In his conversations with students at an Aung San Suu Kyi rally or sharing stories with a Kayah farmer in his village house, the long-suppressed literatures and languages of minorities such as the Chin, Kachin, Shan and others shine through.

The People Elsewhere narrates more than one story. It is a journey through the writers on the periphery of a country undergoing a transformation many thought would never come. It tells of a country where the ‘now’ is intertwined with the ‘before’, where history, and the lessons learnt from it, cannot be so easily set aside in the face of development.

It is a vivid tableau of time and place, and an ode to the ethnic richness of Myanmar.

Lucas Stewart was born in England in 1980 and grew up in Qatar, Iraq and Brunei. He moved to Myanmar in 2011 and worked with writers, poets and publishers in the post-censorship era. His writing on Burmese and ethnic language literature has appeared in several international publications. He left Myanmar in 2016.

‘The People Elsewhere is a vigorous and compelling travel parable. More importantly, it’s the story we’ve been waiting to read about Myanmar, a country with a highly-wrought and complex ethnic history with perhaps over a hundred ethnicities existing beyond the state-driven narrative of ‘Burmese’. - Bones Will Crow: 15 Contemporary Burmese Poets

‘Lucas Stewart’s book is an exquisite map of the many literatures of Myanmar, of the human impulse to express oneself through story and song, and of the courageous bards and storytellers who kept literature alive against the odds. In scenes alternately warming and harrowing, it braids travel, history and literary criticism in a most ingenious way to give us an unforgettable portrait of a country long forgotten by the world.’ - Clouds and editor of India: A Traveller's Literary Companion

‘Lucas Stewart’s journey across Myanmar offers a fascinating insight and a rare glimpse of life through its storytellers. He captures how the writers he meets struggled to keep alive their past and rich patchwork of languages and traditions through their love of literature. Anyone, wanting to discover Myanmar’s rich cultural heritage and how these endearing, diverse and remarkable peoples did more than just survive, will find this an important and essential read.’ - Danziger's Adventures