“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...]

Indonesian women who have Western partners or husbands are often met with negative, sometimes harsh judgment from people around them, from gold diggers to exotic-looking harlots. ​When you see an Indonesian woman with brown complexion walking together with a Western man, for example, you might … [Read more...]