Photographs of Burma by KAREN CONNELLY
Photography exhibition, Sep 27-Oct 5th
Pages Books & Magazines, Random House Canada and NOW Magazine invite you to join Karen Connelly as she celebrates the publication of her new novel The Lizard Cage. In the past decade, researching and writing her latest book, author Karen Connelly visited Burma half-a-dozen times and lived on the Thai-Burmese border for two years. Never far from her camera, Connelly was able to candidly capture on film the lives and landscapes of Burmese people, from the market places to their homes. Burma has been ruled by a brutal military dictatorship for over forty years. Appearing throughout The Lizard Cage, Connelly’s photographs present a vivid and moving testimonial to the spirit, hardships and nobility of the Burmese people. Now, Connelly’s images of Burma will be on display at The Gladstone Hotel’s second floor gallery for a limited exhibition leading up to the launch of The Lizard Cage.
Inside his solitary confinement cell, Teza, who once electrified the people of Burma with his protest songs against the dictatorship, now applies his acute intelligence and Buddhist patience to finding meaning in the interminable days. Arrested by the Burmese secret police, cut off from his family for the first seven years of a twenty-year sentence, Teza painstakingly unrolls the newspaper filters of his rationed cheroot cigarettes to seek news of the outside world. But even in isolation, he has a profound influence on the people around him. His integrity and humour inspire the conscience-ridden senior jailer to radical change. His very existence challenges the brutal authority of the junior jailer, perversely nicknamed Handsome. Teza’s most steady human contact, the common criminal Sein Yun, his food server, views him as his ticket out of jail, trying to entice Teza into Handsome’s web. Lastly there’s Little Brother, an orphan who’s grown up inside the jail, imprisoned by his own deprivation. Teza and the boy are prisoners of different orders, but their extraordinary friendship frees both of them in utterly surprising ways. Overturning our expectations, Karen Connelly presents us with a world that celebrates human spirit, and spirit itself, in the midst of injustice and trauma.
Karen Connelly’s first book of poetry, The Small Words in My Body, won the Pat Lowther Award. Her first book of prose, Touch the Dragon: A Thai Journal—an account of the year she spent in Thailand at seventeen—won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Nonfiction in 1993; at twenty-four, she was the youngest writer ever to win that prize. The Lizard Cage, which will be published by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday in the United States, is set in Burma, a country that has fascinated Connelly for a decade. She is currently working on a book of essays set in the refugee camps and among the rebel armies along the Burmese-Thai border. She makes her home in Toronto.
