This event marked the first anniversary of the monks’ uprising, in which thousands of Buddhist monks protested against Burma’s military dictatorship, and the twentieth anniversary of the 1988 pro-democracy protests by millions of ordinary civilians.
PEN, the Burma Project of the Open Society Institute, and The New York Review of Books joined together to honor Burmese writers whose work has been suppressed by the military regime and to support the victims of the recent cyclone. The event also paid tribute to the thousands of monks who are missing or have lost their lives last year, and to those who have continued to speak out against injustice for the past twenty years.