In Unsilenced, Alan Clements dares to imagine the voice of one of the world's most silenced leaders-Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar's imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize laureate—now entering her fifth year of solitary confinement under the country's brutal military junta.
This bold, visionary work fuses political fiction, spiritual testimony, and literary resistance to conjure an imagined series of conversations with Aung San Suu Kyi—crafted with startling realism, moral clarity, and poetic force. Through these dialogues, dictatorship is unmasked not merely as a regime, but as a pathology—a global affliction stretching from Naypyidaw to Moscow, Beijing, and beyond.
"This is not a biography. It is a literary act of moral imagination—a fearless meditation on tyranny, transcendence, and truth."
Written with the insight of a lifelong activist and the lyricism of a spoken-word artist, Unsilenced is a meditation on the architecture of power, the ethics of resistance, and the sacred resilience of the human spirit. Clements draws from decades of spiritual study, political rebellion, and intimate conversations with Aung San Suu Kyi herself, transforming personal witness into a powerful reckoning with our global condition.
From Myanmar's civil war to the algorithmic chains of modern surveillance, from whispered prayers to smuggled letters, Unsilenced gives voice to the unseen forces of dignity, courage, and inner freedom.
About the Author
Alan Clements is an author, journalist, spoken-word artist, and former Buddhist monk who lived in Burma during the 1980s before being expelled for his outspoken defiance of the military dictatorship.
His work has been featured in The New York Times, Time, The Guardian, Newsweek, and on the BBC, ABC Nightline, CBC, and CNN. With Unsilenced, he offers his most searing and intimate work yet: a radical fusion of literature and liberation, grounded in the belief that truth—spoken or imagined—can still set us free.
Industry Reviews
For over four decades, Alan Clements has lived and breathed Burma's long struggle for freedom — documenting, interviewing, and bearing witness to hundreds of its elected leaders, dissidents, activists, and political prisoners. His collaboration with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, drawn from six months of clandestine meetings at her home following her first release from house arrest in 1995, became the internationally acclaimed The Voice of Hope — a book she herself named, carrying to the world her vision of the Revolution of the Spirit.
In Unsilenced, Clements returns to that sacred conversation, resurrecting Aung San Suu Kyi's voice with poetic precision and moral fire. Though composed as a series of fictional dialogues from her prison cell, they could very well be true — so deeply are they rooted in her conscience, her people's suffering, and the timeless courage of resistance.
Through her voice, he illuminates not only Burma's soul but the universal struggle between fear and freedom — exposing the fascist and authoritarian psychologies that live not just in regimes, but within us all.
At nearly seven hundred pages, each chapter unfolds as a meditation on moral intelligence — a fearless dialogue with conscience at the edge of despair and faith. At this perilous moment, when Aung San Suu Kyi endures her fifth year of solitary confinement and her twenty-first year of total detention, Clements gives her voice back to the world — as prayer, as poetry, and as a reminder that the Revolution of the Spirit is never over there. It is here, now, in all of us.
— Krystal Dyan, Poet, Artist, Literary Critic, and Co-Producer (with Alan Clements) of the forthcoming book Authoritarianism, Patriarchy, and the Role of the Divine Feminine: Conversations with Visionary Women (World Dharma Publications, Spring 2026)
