Mayyu Ali was born in 1991 in Maungdaw Township, Myanmar's Rakhine State (Arakan), the youngest of six children in a fisherman's family.
He writes under the name Mayyu, taken from the mountains and river near his childhood home. His early poems appeared in magazines in Myanmar. In 2017, he was among some 700,000 Rohingya who crossed into Bangladesh after the military operations that began on 25 August.
Two years later he had a poetry collection in print, an online platform of his own, and readers in camps holding close to a million people.
The literature he was joining had barely been written down. Rohingya is largely an oral language and, until recently, was rarely committed to paper.
It has also had little institutional footing.
A Rohingya-language program began on the Burma Broadcasting Service in August 1961; it was closed at the end of October 1965, on the same day as programs in Lahu and Pa-O.
The songs remain hard to find on paper. Documenting the tarana, a Rohingya song genre, the researchers Kazi Fahmida Farzana, Peter Sammonds, and Bayes Ahmed worked with Rohingya refugees in Malaysia.
They assembled their archive from the few lyrics that had been written down, from transcribing singers, and from recordings community members had made themselves.
Their chapter appeared in Religious Sounds Beyond the Global North from Amsterdam University Press in 2024.
Before any of the anthologies, Ali printed The Blossom, a selection of his early poems, and distributed it around the camps.
In April 2019, two poets arrived from outside: the British poet James Byrne and the Bangladeshi-French poet Shehzar Doja.
Over two days they worked with twenty refugees in what they were told were the first creative writing workshops held in the camps. Ali had helped set them up.
He could not attend.
After the sessions, the editors asked participants to send work. The poems came in faster than they could be read—ten or more on some days. Few of the poets had pens or paper; almost all had mobile phones.
A planned pamphlet of about forty pages turned into a book.
I am a Rohingya: Poetry from the Camps and Beyond, published by Arc Publications in July 2019, ran to eighty-three pages: ten of the workshop poets, alongside Rohingya writers from the wider diaspora, poems in Burmese, three songs in Rohingya, and folk songs sung by Jani Alam. Many contributors used pseudonyms; being named would put them at risk.
The Poetry Book Society made it the inaugural title in its World Choice selection, chosen by the poet Ilya Kaminsky.
By then Ali had built something of his own.
In 2019 he and a group of friends launched Art Garden Rohingya, an online platform for Rohingya poetry and art—unfunded, with no institution behind it, run from inside the camps.
By 2022 it had gathered work by more than a hundred Rohingya poets, writers, and artists.
It has mattered particularly to women with few other routes into print. Shahida Win published her first poem there in 2019: "Thami Maha," Daughter the Great. She has said she wrote it after speaking with Rohingya women and girls about the discrimination they faced.
In 2020 she was selected by UNHCR as a youth leader and traveled to Geneva to speak on behalf of her community; in January 2023, she was invited to present her work at the Dhaka Lit Fest.
Others followed. The photographer Sahat Zia Hero founded Rohingyatographer in 2021, with support from the creative producer David Palazón.
The collective publishes a magazine and photobooks, among them Unseen Courage, curated in 2023 by Ishrat Bibi—the first monograph of work by ten Rohingya women photographers.
In 2024, it supported the historian Aman Ullah in publishing A History of Rohingyas to 1948. Separately, the Rohingya Cultural Memory Center in Cox's Bazar, an initiative of the International Organization for Migration, has identified at least twenty-three genres of Rohingya folk music, along with dozens of futhi—fairy tales told through song—and sixty-four sewing techniques.
Ali's own books span the years before and after resettlement.
Exodus: Between Genocide and Me appeared in 2019, while he was still in the camps; The White Elephant, an illustrated story told through the eyes of a Rohingya boy, followed.
He was resettled in Canada in 2021 and completed a master's degree at the University of Waterloo in 2024. His memoir, written with the French journalist Émilie Lopes, was published in French by Grasset in 2022 as L'effacement and in English in 2025 as Eradication, translated by Siba Barkataki.
The memoir makes one decision that repays attention: it does not begin with the burning. Reviewers note that it opens instead on the Purma River, on bamboo forests and morning mist over the Mayu Mountains, and on a boy learning the Burmese alphabet in classrooms shared with Rakhine and Hindu children. Belonging first, rupture afterwards.
He is not the only one writing from exile. Habiburahman, who reached Australia by boat in December 2009 and spent thirty-two months in detention before his release, remains stateless; he wrote First, They Erased Our Name with Sophie Ansel.
Ali now directs a Rohingya language preservation project at the Community Rebuilding Centre, transcribing oral traditions into Rohingya script with Burmese and English translations.
Four collections are complete. As the ninth anniversary of the exodus approaches on 25 August, the writing that might hold the language is being done in Ukhiya and Teknaf—and in the cities its authors have scattered to.
Ehatasham Ul Hoque Eiten teaches English at Daffodil International University, Dhaka, and writes on migration, identity, politics, literature, and education in South Asia.
