At twenty-six, he published his first collection of poems Hpan-mi-ein [The Glass Lantern], which won a national award, before moving to Rangoon in 1967, where he worked in the translation and publication department in Rangoon University for twenty years. Under Ne Win's dictatorship, which promulgated the Burmese Way to Socialism, Tin Moe, like all writers who refused to be a socialist party member, began to feel increasing pressure from the government from the late ‘60s onwards. After the nationwide pro-democracy uprising in August 1988, working with Aung San Suu Kyi, he became an "Intellectual Committee" member of the National League for Democracy. As a result, in 1991, he was held without charge for six months and then confined for four years in the infamous Insein prison, under the 1962 Printers and Publishers Registration Law (political prisoners were not given any materials to read or write with). Just before another possible arrest in 1999, he managed to escape Burma after obtaining a passport under his much less-known real name of U Ba Gyan. He never returned to Burma, taking political asylum in the United States in 2000, dying in Los Angeles on January 22, 2007.