“Saya Tin Moe passed away,” read a text message o­n my phone this morning. The news made me tremble, and I knew that the day would bring grief to Burmese communities across the world and throughout Burma. The death of such a man moves beyond grief. Burma has lost o­ne of its brightest sons, both literally and politically.

Burma’s beloved poet laureate died in exile in California o­n Monday at the age of 74. The actual cause of his death remains unclear, but it came suddenly at approximately 5 pm local time.

To call Tin Moe a poet does not capture the full stature of the man or what he has accomplished for his people. His literary career began in his teenage years, and through the decades fueled Burma’s many freedom movements.

Tin Moe was born Maung Ba Gyan in a remote village of Taungtha Township, Upper Burma. He began his education at a local monastery and later impressed U E Maung, a professor at Rangoon University, with an essay he wrote. Tin Moe passed his matriculation exam with distinction in Burmese.

For the next half century, Tin Moe devoted his life to literature, publishing more than 30 respected books and essays and winning numerous literary prizes, including the National Literary Prize in 1965 for his first book The Lantern, and the Prince Claus Award in 2004 from the Netherlands for “outstanding literary achievement and his role in sustaining culture as a source of strength, inspiration and identity.”

When Tin Moe publicly supported the pro-democracy movement in 1988, the government responded by prohibiting his books from being republished. He left Burma in 1999.

I still remember the evenings I spent with Saya Tin Moe between 1988 and 1991. He would often join our conversations at a local teashop and talk to us about his thoughts o­n literature and politics. His conversation, like the words of his poems, always expressed his passion for literature and his love of freedom.

But like many in Burma at that time, Tin Moe was arrested at about the same time as I was in 1991 for being active in politics. He was sentenced to four years in Burma’s infamous Insein Jail. Though we were separately detained, I heard that he never despaired while in prison and cherished his conversations with other political prisoners.

His crime had been the support and involvement in the nationwide 1988 pro-democracy uprising and his unswerving support for Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of the main opposition party National League for Democracy. He and a group of other Burmese intellectuals served as advisors to the party from its foundation in 1988. 

Friends and colleagues described his political involvement as particularly selfless. The well-known author Maung Wun Tha put it this way: “Saya Tin Moe is beyond honesty. I would say he is pure.” According to Thar Noe, another famous writer, “He never made a profit from his personal interest during his life.