Thu Thu Aung

Thu Thu is a Myanmar journalist, and correspondent at Reuters. Since the military coup of February 2021, she has continued reporting from Thailand.

Thu Thu started her career working in local newsrooms in 2007. She became a political editor in 2009, operating under the harsh press censorship system of the Than Shwe military regime. In 2012, she interviewed Aung San Suu Kyi after her release from decades of house arrest. Thu Thu has covered multiple ethnic armed conflicts around the country, in the world's longest running civil war. She has also conducted investigative reporting into transnational drug syndicates, money laundering, child soldiers and human rights abuses around Myanmar.

In 2019, Thu Thu was part of the Reuters Myanmar Bureau who won a Pulitzer prize for reporting on the Rohingya genocide, for which two of her colleagues were imprisoned for 18 months. The reporting included perpetrator testimony of a massacre of Rohingya civilians, and led to the Myanmar military taking the unprecedented step of imprisoning several of their soldiers in a rare act of recognition.

Thu Thu graduated in Economics from Dagon University in 2005, and completed a certificate in Advanced Chinese from Yangon University of Foreign Languages in 2007.

Project topic: How international and local media organisations can best navigate the post-coup media landscape in Myanmar

Sponsor: Thomson Reuters Foundation