Media Clippings

Yogyakarta’s Apsas 2025 Honoring Literary Legends

Feb 04, 2025 / RRI by Diva Rifdah Rizkia Puspitaningnala
Yogyakarta, as the City of Literature, boasts a rich history, an active literary community, a supportive environment for creativity, and the community's support. The city is the birthplace of superb literary works and a center for developing Indonesian literature.

One literary event that has helped revitalize the literary tradition in Yogyakarta is the Apresiasi Sastra (Apsas), a literary appreciation event.

The event consistently facilitates discussions and ideas on various literary works, from poetry to novels.

The 20th Apsas literary event occurred last weekend at Balai Budaya Karangkitri in Panggungharjo Village, Sewon Subdistrict, Bantul Regency, Yogyakarta.

Reflections of the Feminist Movement on the Rejection of JILF: “Who Do We Work With?”

Jan 31, 2025 / Konde.co by Nurul Nur Azizah Theresia Pratiwi Elingsetyo Sanubari
Intan Paramaditha and Trend Asia have simultaneously announced their withdrawal from organizing the 2024 Jakarta International Literary Festival (JILF). JILF is considered not taking a firm stance against pro-genocide sponsors in Gaza, Palestine.

The 2024 Jakarta International Literary Festival (JILF) was held November 27 – December 1, 2024 brought green narrative theme. Along the event, several parties withdrew and stopped cooperating with the organization of the literary event.

JIFL, which this year aims to promote literature and culture as well as environmental sustainability, is considered not transparent by the organizers. They are also not assertive about the sponsors behind the event, who considered to be pro-genocide in Palestine.

The pro-genocide sponsors in question: Frankfurter Buchmesse and the German Federal Foreign Officer.

How children’s books are raising environmental awareness in Indonesia

Jan 07, 2025 / Eco-Business by Samantha Ho
While these cases could have substantial impacts on the environmental rights of Indonesians and their children, raising awareness about climate litigation has been challenging for environmental campaigners, said environmental lawyer Sekar Banjaran Aji, who is also a campaigner for Greenpeace Indonesia.

“Climate litigation as a topic is very difficult and [complex] even for adults,” Sekar Banjaran told the Eco-Business Podcast.

In response, Greenpeace Indonesia worked with journalist and author Titah Aw and illustrator Sekar Bestari to produce a series of children’s books that simplified these topics into narratives that could be easily understood.

In this podcast, they share:

How they combined key facts and imaginative elements to tell climate stories Why it is important for stories of climate change and litigation to be told more widely What parents and children have learned from reading the books How the author and illustrator’s own experiences with nature shaped their environmental advocacy

The 2024 Ubud Writers and Readers Festival – On the Struggles of Truthtelling

Sep 23, 2024 / SBS by Dina Indrasafitri
The 2024 Ubud Writers and Readers Festival will attempt to uphold its theme ‘Satyam Vada Dharmam Chara’, or ‘Speak the Truth, Practice Kindness’ through conversations about media ethics; the perils of speaking the truth and about marginalised voices that are often left unheard.

“One of the ways that the theme materialised was looking at the media landscape and how the ‘truth’ is presented through both the mainstream media outlets and alternative media outlets and throughout the year we saw a lot of very unfortunate conflicts that revealed to us how different the stories are from two separate sides and how much we need media to be more impartial,” The Festival’s Head of International Programming Hannah Curtis said in an interview with SBS Indonesian.

A Brilliant Tribute to Indonesian Literature in GPU’s MISTERI PEMBACA TERAKHIR

Sep 23, 2024 / Broadway World Indonesia by Rakaputra Paputungan
As part of Pesta Literasi Indonesia , Gramedia Pustaka Utama hosted the show from August 30th to September 1st, 2024.

As part of Pesta Literasi Indonesia (Indonesia’s Literation Party), Gramedia Pustaka Utama hosted a theatre performance titled Misteri Pembaca Terakhir (Mystery of the Last Reader) from August 30th to September 1st, 2024. The show ran three times at Graha Bhakti Budaya. Agus Noor acted as the writer and director, with Dexara Hachika as the assistant director. Alongside the Gramedia Team, they’ve crafted an amalgamation of famous Indonesian literary works in Misteri Pembaca Terakhir.

Misteri Pembaca Terakhir tells a story about a group of friends who love to read even when literacy is at an all-time low. They lamented this as their bookstore got vandalized by hoodlums, risking closing. Then suddenly, one of them, RonRon, mysteriously disappears. This group of friends then goes on a journey to find him, discovering the truth of his disappearance through encounters with book characters that come to life.

It’s revealed that RonRon was kidnapped by a group of mysterious beings. These beings seek to eliminate all books and readers as they fear that readers are able to take hold of knowledge and truth. Eventually, the people who are loyal to reading manage to unite their power and defeat this antagonistic force. In the end, RonRon and his friends renovate their bookstore so that they can keep encouraging people to read and there won’t ever be ‘The Last Reader’.

Under the poetic stars

Aug 09, 2024 / Inside Indonesia by Caitlin Hughes
Benteng (Fort) Rotterdam is a cream-brick, red-roofed fortress complex on the historic, harbourside edge of Makassar, South Sulawesi. The seventeenth-century Dutch colonial fort does not look out of place in a part of Makassar where Chinese, Dutch, and local South Sulawesi architecture stands alongside glassy, high-rise hotels. Today the Fort is Makassar’s most famous landmark, an enduring symbol of tempo doeloe (the olden times).

When I first visited Fort Rotterdam last October it was a searing hot day at the end of the dry season and the place was eerily quiet. When I returned for the opening night of the 2024 Makassar International Writers Festival (MIWF) in late May this year, the ambience was very different. It was a clear, cool night. Crowds of people milled around the site. Someone told me that opening night is always ‘like a giant reunion’ for the local arts community and the public. There were rows of food stalls and coloured signs and banners and the main stage was decorated with bright cartoons.

Since it began in 2011, MIWF has witnessed a remarkable growth. The festival was established by the late Dr Lily Yulianti Farid, a writer and academic, through Rumata’ Artspace – a multidisciplinary ‘artspace,’ which she co-founded with prominent film director Riri Riza at the Riza family’s old home in Gunung Sari Baru, Makassar. Although some outside observers perceive MIWF to be a ‘spinoff’ event from Bali’s famous Ubud Writers and Readers Festival (established 2006), the reality is very different.

Best-selling Indonesian authors you should be reading

May 21, 2024 / Jakarta Post by Josa Lukman Sheena Suparman
To mark National Book Day on Friday, we are delving into the world of literature to highlight some of the country’s best authors.

As the clouds descend upon Jakarta, similar to how Alice retreats to wonderland and Wendy flies off to Neverland, we are retreating to our separate rooms and touring the country through books all weekend long.

Come join our journey with these amazing local authors.

The Consulate General Holds Indonesian Arts and Culture Promotion Week, “Jalan-jalan Indonesia” in Perth

May 02, 2024 / Foreign Affairs
The Consulate General of the Republic of Indonesia in Perth, in collaboration with a number of partners in Western Australia, The Sharon Flindell, the Literature Centre, and The State Library of WA, had organised Indonesian Art and Culture and Culinary Week titled "Jalan-Jalan Indonesia."

Arts and culture promotion activities included screenings of various Indonesian cultural films and documentaries, talk show with Indonesian writer Reda Gaudiamo and local Western Australian writers, and a culinary event featuring celebrity chef Wayan Kresna Yasa.

Ten Indonesian Writers selected for Emerging Writers Program

Apr 30, 2024 / UWRF News
Yayasan Mudra Swari Saraswati is thrilled to announce the talented Indonesian writers selected for the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival 2024 Emerging Writers Program. From 449 submissions, ten Indonesian writers were chosen by the curating team of literary figures Dee Lestari, Faisal Oddang, and Putu Juli Sastrawan for their exceptional and original stories. These writers will now participate in a mentorship program, including the publication of their work in the annual anthology and being featured at the 2024 Festival this October.

Right Where They Have Always Been

Apr 04, 2024 / ArtReview by Max Crosbie-Jones
Why aren’t the literary scenes of Southeast Asia getting more regional and global traction?

Try as international book publishers might, Southeast Asia’s literary scenes cannot easily be distilled to a marketable essence – or bound together. Take the S.E.A. Write Award, for example, a prestigious literary accolade that was, until recently, presented annually at Bangkok’s storied Mandarin Oriental Hotel. Since 1979, novelists from across the ASEAN region have gathered for a ceremony that is arguably as infuriating as it is inspiring: no scheme for translating each country’s winning novel into any other language exists. As a result, an award that seeks to expand readership and foster a sense of literary unity in diversity is, in fact, a recurring reminder of how Southeast Asia’s manifest pluralism, its myriad languages and motley cultural histories, hinders such intraregional exchanges. Southeast Asia in this context is an unedifying construct: a winning Thai or Indonesian novel will still only be read in Thai or Indonesian, and so the literary worlds of participating nations remain siloed from one another.