This was a small bamboo hut just near our house. She covered me in a damp cloth, scooped me into her arms, and ran as fast as her legs would carry her to the village clinic. But I was always a sickly child, and now she feared that she had lost me. I already had a high fever, and she had hoped that overnight I would have slept it off. One morning my mother discovered me lying unconscious in our bamboo hut. It was my first brush with death and, sadly, there were to be many more. When I was two years old I died and came back to life again. By turns uplifting, tragic and entirely gripping, this is the extraordinary true story of the girl from the jungle who became an icon of a suffering land. She became the face of a nation enslaved, rubbing shoulders with presidents and film stars. The following year, at a 'free Burma' march, she was plucked from the crowd to appear on the BBC, the first of countless interviews with the world's media. Zoya, a gifted pupil, was eventually able to escape, first to Bangkok and then, with her enemies still pursuing her, in 2004 she fled to the UK and claimed asylum.

Conditions in the camp were difficult, and Zoya now had to care for her ailing mother. Her family scattered, Zoya sought sanctuary across the border in a Thai refugee camp. So began two terrible years of running from guns, as Zoya joined thousands of refugees hiding in the jungle. With their house in flames, Zoya and her family fled. At the age of fourteen, however, Zoya's childhood was shattered as the Burmese army attacked. Her early years were blissfully removed from the war. Many Karen are Christian or Buddhist, but Zoya's parents were animist, venerating the spirits of forest, river and moon.

She lived in a bamboo hut on stilts by the Moei River she hunted for edible fungi with her much-loved adopted brother, Say Say. For decades the Karen have been under attack from Burma's military junta Zoya's mother was a guerrilla soldier, her father a freedom activist. Zoya Phan was born in the remote jungles of Burma, to the Karen ethnic group.

Little Daughter by Zoya Phan