My friend and former teacher Anna Allott, who has died aged 93, was a lecturer in Burmese at Soas University of London from the early 1950s until her retirement in the early 90s.
Aside from her academic work she was a great promoter of friendship between the UK and Myanmar (Burma), and did much to try to raise awareness in Britain of the country’s literature. Appointed OBE in 1998, she was secretary of the Britain-Burma Society from 1980 to 1997, and from 2002 to 2016 was a trustee of Prospect Burma, a charity set up with funds from her friend Aung San Suu Kyi’s Nobel peace prize to provide scholarships for Burmese students.
Born in London to Marie Hloušková, a Czech-born French teacher, and Thomas Sargant, who later co-founded the human rights organisation Justice, Anna attended South Hampstead high school before gaining a degree in French and Russian at the London School of Slavonic Studies.
Moving to Soas as a postgraduate student in the phonetics and linguistics department, she initially studied Chinese before switching in 1952 to learn Burmese. It was at Soas that she met Antony Allott, an academic expert in African law. They married in 1952, shortly before she headed alone to Rangoon and Mandalay to study Burmese for nine months.
Returning to Soas and married life, Anna was appointed an assistant lecturer in 1953, later moving up to become a lecturer. As part of her Soas work she was also required, on behalf of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, to provide tuition in Burmese to a succession of British diplomats – me among them.
The two of us later collaborated with Ma Thida Sanchaung on a book, Inked Over, Ripped Out (1993), which collected together censored short stories. At heart a lexicographer, she also ensured that her colleague Eugenie Henderson’s dictionary of Bwe Karen, an ethnic minority language of Myanmar, saw the light of day after Henderson’s death in 1997. In 2009 her own Burmese Dictionary of Grammatical Forms, compiled with John Okell, was published.
After she stood down as a full-time lecturer Anna continued to teach at Soas on a part-time basis for a number of years. Following her initial visit to Myanmar in the early 50s she did not return there until 1976, partly because of the demands of work and family but also due to Myanmar’s isolation after a 1962 coup. Blacklisted by the military regime in 2005, she made her final visit to the country in 2014, when a civilian government emerged.
Over the years Anna welcomed many Burmese visitors to her house in Bodicote, Oxfordshire, where she also held open days of her lovely garden in aid of local charities. Antony died of Parkinson’s disease in 2002; she was chair of the Banbury Parkinson’s Society for 16 years, before and after his death. Later she moved to Wedmore in Somerset, where she spent her final 12 years.
She is survived by her three children, Nicholas, Stephen and Lucy, 12 grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.
