Fans of Ahmad Fuadi’s work can now add his newly released book, Anak Rantau (Wandering Kid), to their bookshelf. It has been four years since Ahmad Fuadi’s last book, Rantau 1 Muara (The Estuary of Wander), was published. Rantau 1 Muara was the last book to complete Fuadi’s well-known Negeri 5 … [Read more...]

Home to the world’s largest Muslim population, Indonesia is feared to be turning more conservative, many believe, after the sentencing of former Jakarta governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, or Ahok, on charges of blasphemy, which he denied. While that fear might be true if one looks at the political … [Read more...]

“You gotta stay true to the nuance of the work, the language, but you need to transfer that to the new language that you’re working with, in the translated one.” ~Stefanny Irawan, on translating native language books. Stefanny grew up in East Java and attended college at Surabaya where, because … [Read more...]

Eka Kurniawan is considered the most exciting living writer in Indonesia, yet very few outside the archipelago know of his work. His first novel Beauty is a wound was published in 2002 when he was twenty six, at a time when Indonesia was transitioning to democracy after more than thirty years of … [Read more...]

"When you’re reading a novel like mine,” Eka Kurniawan said last month, over coffee, you’re reading “a joke about history.” We were at a hotel in Melbourne. Kurniawan was in town for the Melbourne Writers Festival, his first stop on a global publicity tour for his novels “Man Tiger” and “Beauty Is a … [Read more...]