Factbox: Myanmar's Aung San Suu Kyi

(Reuters) - Myanmar's detained opposition leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, will be released from house arrest in November, a government minister told a meeting of local officials on January 21, according to three people who were present.

That would probably be after a planned general election, the first in Myanmar since the 1990 polls that Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) won and the military junta ignored.

The date of the election has yet to be announced.

Here are some facts about Suu Kyi, who went from being an English country housewife to an incarcerated Nobel peace laureate because of her fight for democracy in the former Burma.

-- Born in Rangoon (now Yangon) in June 1945, she is the daughter of General Aung San, an independence hero assassinated in 1947. Her mother, Daw Khin Kyi, was also a prominent public figure.

-- She studied politics in Delhi and philosophy, politics and economics at Britain's Oxford University. In 1972 she married British academic Michael Aris.

-- Suu Kyi returned to Yangon in April 1988 amid countrywide pro-democracy protests against the army regime. Keen to continue her father's legacy, she entered politics and became NLD secretary-general.

-- The junta placed the charismatic and popular Suu Kyi under house arrest in July 1989 for "endangering the state." Even without her, the NLD won 392 of 485 parliamentary seats in Myanmar's first election in almost 30 years. The military refused to relinquish power.

-- Suu Kyi, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, has been in prison or under house arrest off and on since 1989. She was found guilty on August 11, 2009, of breaking a security law by allowing American intruder John Yettaw to stay at her lakeside home for two nights. Critics said the charges were trumped up to keep her out of the 2010 polls.

-- She has since made several offers to the ruling junta to lobby the international community to lift a wide range of sanctions on the country, most of which have been in place for more than two decades. Junta strongman Than Shwe has not responded and the regime has described Suu Kyi's move as "insincere" and "dishonest."

(Compiled by Bangkok Newsroom; Editing by Paul Tait)