This month ASEAN celebrates its 49th anniversary. What does it mean for us? For almost half a century, ASEAN has been a big illusion fed to all of us. In school we were taught about ASEAN and told that we were “ASEAN people”, without ever understanding what that meant or using the term outside of … [Read more...]

Cyber-literature is a thing nowadays in which readers are able to have real-time interaction with authors, feeding them with praise or “blahs.” The digital platform may bring inspiring writers to stardom or stop them at first try at posting a short story, but its popularity in Indonesia has not yet … [Read more...]

INDONESIA’s capital Jakarta will again host the fourth annual Asean Literary Festival (ALF) in August 2017 as the regional Southeast Asian bloc celebrates its fiftieth anniversary. Now in its fourth year, the ALF was established by prominent Indonesian novelist Okky Madasari and former editor of … [Read more...]

The fifth edition of the Makassar International Writers Festival 2015, a four day affair of panels, workshops and performances, was held in the port city of Makassar, in South Sulawesi, Indonesia. The theme for this year‘s festival was ‘Knowledge and the Universe.’ While most of the workshops … [Read more...]

Faisal Oddang, 23, remembers how he loathed writing assignments at school. But at some stage in his early youth, he decided he liked writing. Since then, he has worked his way up to become an accomplished writer. Erni Aladjai, 32, by contrast, has been writing and sending entries to writing … [Read more...]