Mother of Mandalay

            Ludu Daw Amar (born 29 November 1915), whose name is also spelt Ludu Daw Ah Mar, is a well known and respected leading dissident writer and journalist in Mandalay, Myanmar (formerly Burma). She was married to fellow writer and journalist Ludu U Hla (1910 - 1982) and is the mother of another popular writer Nyi Pu Lay. She is best known for her outspoken anti-government views and radical left wing journalism besides her outstanding work on traditional Burmese arts, theatre, dance and music, and several works of translation from English, both fiction and non-fiction.

Student writer and activist
            Born into an old established Mandalay family that traded in tobacco and manufactured cheroots, Amar was the fourth in a family of twelve, out of which only six survived to adulthood. She was educated at the American Baptist Mission School and subsequently the National High School under the headmaster Abdul Razak who later became the Education Minister in Aung San's cabinet and was assassinated with him and others in July 1947. She read science at the Mandalay Intermediate College and went on to Rangoon University for a Bachelor's degree. Her first notable work was a translation of Trials in Burma by Maurice Collis in 1938, and by that time she was already published in the university's Owei (Peacock's Call) magazine, and also Kyipwa Yay (Progress) magazine, run by her future husband U Hla, under her own name as well as the pen names Mya Myitzu and Khin La Win.
            When the second university students strike in history broke out in 1936, Amar and her friend from Mandalay M.A. Ma Ohn became famous as women student leaders among the strikers camped out on the terraces of the Shwedagon Pagoda. U Hla was a staunch supporter of the strike and started courting Amar; in 1939 they got married and U Hla moved his magazine to Mandalay.

Publications
Daw Amar has written several books including biographies, travelogues, treatises on traditional Burmese culture, and numerous articles in various magazines, some of them autobiographical and many collected into books later.