Thant Myint-U is an historian and a former United Nations official.
He was born 31 January 1966 in New York city to Burmese parents and is the grandson of former UN Secretary-General U Thant. He was educated at Harvard and Cambridge and received his PhD in history from Cambridge in 1996.
Following the 1988 pro-democracy uprising in Burma, he spent a year on the Burmese-Thai border working with Burmese refugees and asylum seekers.
He has served in three UN peacekeeping operations. He first worked with the UN in 1992, as a human rights officer with the UN Transitional Authority for Cambodia in Phnom Penh. In 1994 he was the spokesman for the UN Protection Force in the former Yugoslavia, based in Sarajevo, and in 1996 was a political officer in the Office of the UN's Special Representative for Bosnia-Hercegovina. In 2000 he joined the UN Secretariat in New York, becoming in 2004 the head of policy planning in the Department of Political Affairs and later a senior officer in the Executive Office of the Secretary-General. He was also a member of the secretariat of the Secretary-General's Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, many of whose recommendations were adopted at the 2006 summit of world leaders.
From 1995-1999 he was a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, where he taught and researched Asian and British colonial history. He is the author of three books including The Making of Modern Burma (Cambridge University Press 2000) and The River of Lost Footsteps (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2006). He has also written for The New York Times, the Washington Post, the International Herald Tribune, the Far Eastern Economic Review and the Times Literary Supplement.
He is currently a visiting senior fellow at the International Peace Academy and a Research Associate of the Cambridge Centre for History and Economics.