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Jamyang Norbu was educated at St. Joseph's School in Darjeeling. He has worked for the Tibetan government-in-exile in various posts since 1967, and was briefly a member of the Tibetan Resistance Force in Mustang. Norbu was one of the convenors of the first Tibetan Youth Congress (1970), and member of the Central Executive Committee for ten years. He was also the creator of Tibetans-in-exile taxation scheme (the green book system), which has been the main source of funding for the exile government since 1972. Norbu has regularly commented on Tibetan and Chinese affairs. A collection of his political essays were published as a book, Illusion and Reality (1989), by the TYC. Chinese authorities in Tibet have, on the other hand, derided his writings as being inconsequential as "the wings of a fly beating against a boulder".
He was the director of the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts (1979-84), and also the manager of the first Tibetan cultural troupe to tour internationally in 1975. He has written and produced five plays: The Chinese Horse (1970), Yuru (1981), The Claws of Karma (1982), Official Problem (1984), Titanic II (1998) and a traditional opera libretto The Iron Bridge (1983). He is currently working on two plays, Longsho, a fable of the freedom struggle and Stumbling Around Everest. He also edited and contributed to Performing Traditions of Tibet. Besides a few literary reviews and short stories Norbu is the author of Horseman in the Snow (1978), translated into Japanese, Polish and French and reissued as Warriors of Tibet. His novel The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes published by Harper Collins (India) in October 1999 has become a best-seller in India and has received unanimously enthusiastic reviews in the Indian press. The British edition is being released in November of this year by John Murray, while the American edition published by Bloomsbury is scheduled for the spring of 2001. His next novel Echoes From Lost Mountains, is to be published by Bloomsbury Publications in 2002. A second collection of his essays, Shadow Tibet, is expected in print in March 2001. For his writings Norbu has been awarded a bursary in 1991, by the Scottish Arts Council, along with eight other Scottish-based writers and poets.
Norbu has lectured on Tibetan culture and the Freedom Struggle at more than a hundred universities and institutions in the USA, Canada, Australia, France, India, Japan and the UK; at such venues as the Harvard Law School, The Harvard Education Forum, the John.F.Kennedy School of Government, MIT, Columbia University, the John King Fairbanks Centre for East Asian Research, Stanford University, U.C.L.A, U.C. Berkeley, The National Holocaust Memorial Museum (Washington D.C.) the Canadian Institute of International Affairs, the Royal Ontario Museum, Cambridge University, The Royal Academy of Arts (London), The Swedish Institute of International Affairs and others He has also appeared on a number of TV and radio shows and interviews all over the world to argue the case for Tibet.
Jamyang Norbu was a founding director of the Amnye Machen Institute, Tibetan Centre for Advanced Studies, in Dharamshala, which was awarded the 1994 and 1996 Poul Lauretzen Freedom Award (Denmark). Besides its many publications and educational and cultural programmes, the Institute has hosted the First National Conference of Tibetan Writers (1995) and the Sea of Inhumanity, the Conference on Tibet in the Cultural Revolution (1996). He is presently a member of the board of directors of AMI. From 1993 to 1996 Norbu was editor of Mangtso (Democracy) the largest independent Tibetan language newspaper. Norbu is also the editor of Lungta, a journal on Tibetan history and culture published by AMI.
Jamyang Norbu is married to Dr. Tenzing Chounzom, and has a daughter, Namkha Lhamo, born February 20, 1997. |
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