PRESS RELEASE: New memoir by Australian journalist – Our Home in Myanmar

Our Home in Myanmar
Four years in Yangon
Jessica Mudditt

RRP: AU$27.99
Memoir
Published 10 May 2021
Paperback ISBN: 978-0648914228
Ebook ISBN: B08X41RNY6
Audiobook ISBN: 978-0-6489142-4-2

A new memoir about Myanmar by Australian journalist Jessica Mudditt will be published on Monday 10 May.

Myanmar has been making front page headlines for all the wrong reasons of late. Following a military coup on 1 February and the removal of Aung San Suu Kyi’s elected government, it has been plunged back into dictatorship. The people of Myanmar are defying the brutal junta with a civil disobedience movement and mass protests. The country is on the brink of civil war and it may become a failed state. Some retain hope that the people will ultimately win and that the military will be removed, once and for all, from its involvement in politics and virtually every aspect of daily life.

Journalist Jessica Mudditt has written a memoir about the four years she lived in Yangon from 2012. Our Home in Myanmar documents a period of great hope and progress for the country, despite the challenges that abounded. During the historic elections of 2015, Jessica was the first expatriate journalist to work for the country’s state-run newspaper, The Global New Light of Myanmar. She also worked at the British Embassy and the United Nations.

BLURB

Myanmar – shrouded in mystery, misunderstood and isolated for half a century.

After a whirlwind romance in Bangladesh, Australian journalist Jessica Mudditt and her Bangladeshi husband Sherpa arrive in Yangon in 2012 – just as the military junta is beginning to relax its ironclad grip on power. It is a high-risk atmosphere; a life riddled with chaos and confusion as much as it is with wonder and excitement.

Jessica joins a small team of old-hand expat editors at The Myanmar Times, whose Burmese editor is still languishing in prison. Whether she is covering a speech by Aung San Suu Kyi, getting dangerously close to cobras, directing cover shoots with Burmese models, or scaling Bagan’s thousand-year-old temples, Jessica is entranced and challenged by a country undergoing rapid change.

But as the historic elections of 2015 draw near, it becomes evident that the road to democracy is full of twists, turns and false starts. The couple is blindsided when a rise in militant Buddhism takes a personal turn and challenges their belief that they have found a home in Myanmar.

Book launch Sydney: Gleebooks in Glebe, 6pm, Friday 21 May https://www.gleebooks.com.au/event/jessica-mudditt-our-home-in-myanmar/
Launched by Jamie Parker MP. Mr Parker is the state member for Balmain and a co-founder of the Australian Coalition for Democracy in Burma. He has been involved in the Myanmar democracy movement for over twenty years.

Book launch Melbourne: Australian Institute of International Affairs, 5.30pm, Thursday 27 May – https://aiiavic.tidyhq.com/public/schedule/events/34786-our-home-in-myanmar-book-launch
Launched by Christopher Lamb, Australia’s former ambassador to Myanmar and president of the Australia Myanmar Institute.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jessica Mudditt is a Sydney-based journalist whose articles have been published by The Economist, BBC, CNN, GQ and Marie Claire. She was accredited as a newspaper journalist in London in 2009 and spent a decade working in the UK, Bangladesh and Myanmar before returning to Australia in 2016.

A dollar from every book sold will go towards supporting democracy protesters in Myanmar, via Support Myanmar.

For more information, interviews or review copies, please contact:

Jessica Mudditt
Author and journalist
Ph: 0477 346 152
E: [email protected]
W: https://jessicamudditt.com
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessicamudditt
Twitter: https://twitter.com/JessicaMudditt

ENDS