It’s a Festive October

With Frankfurt Book Fair 2015–one of the most celebrated book fairs in the world–coming up in the counting weeks, undoubtedly October will become one of the busiest months for publishing companies around the world. As the 2015 Guest of Honor country at the Fair, Indonesia too has been working actively to prepare for the country’s first showcase on the global publishing stage.

It’s a festive October and everyone is doing something. That includes us, too. However, that’s not really the case.

When we decided to develop and maintain this site, we sincerely set Frankfurt Book Fair 2015 as one of the milestones to measure our achievements. Considering the sheer size and magnitude of the fair, we set our goal for the website: to have at least 500 writers and 1000 book titles along with its English synopsis in the website before October 2015.

Sixteen months since its first publication and eight months after the official public launching, we had to reconsider the initial plan. It will be a great milestone to achieve. However, as a self-funded project and our short-sightedness on the steps we need to take to accomplish the goal, unfortunately the path leading to the goal is still ahead of us. For now, we can only say: ein Kuss aus der Ferne, Frankfurt!

We understand that there are more works to be done before we achieve that milestone. In the meantime, we decide to focus on things we can do best while not forgetting our ultimate goal, which is to provide comprehensive information about Indonesian writers or literature that is accessible to the international community. Thus, as we are growing our database, we also decide to postpone our delivery of the third edition of our so-called-bi-monthly magazine. Sometimes to be able to move forward, you need to take a step backward in order to reassess your current position, right? So, in case you are wondering about our existence, that’s where we are right now: alive, well and taking our baby-but-sure-steps toward our goals.

Anywow, on to the more exciting part of October. There are two big-scale literary events in Indonesia happening this month, so take your calendar and mark the dates!

The 2015 Salihara International Literary Biennale is currently held in Jakarta. Started on October 3, the event will run until October 25. On Wednesday, October 21, we will take a part on “Souvenirs from Frankfurt” session. It’s a translation workshop and discussion on introducing Indonesia’s literary works to the world. If you are interested to get to know us and our work, let’s meet there!

We are also going to attend Ubud Writers and Readers Festival 2015, which will be held in Ubud, Bali, from October 28 until November 1. As a media, we will cover stories coming up from the scenes, especially about the participating Indonesian writers. Please look forward to it on our website! We are also going to actively seek out opportunities to help promoting the participating Indonesian writers to all our fellow international journos coming up to the event.

There is also Singapore Writers Festival 2015 to happen late in October, where Agustinus Wibowo and Ayu Utami are the guest-speakers among other well-known speakers in Singapore literary scenes.

For more information about those three festivals, also another literary events happening in October, you can conveniently check our Events page.

That’s all the update for now. We’ll bring more news on Indonesia literary scenes later on. Right now we have to go back to work: curate the data and build a better site to promote Indonesian writers for the world. If you want to give a little love and support for our work, here’s on how you can help!