Andari Deswandhy

A sixteen-year-old girl who has been educated by foreign school systems since early childhood. As a result, she felt that she had to change this reality somehow.

Andari began to learn about her Indonesian heritage by reading Indonesian folktales. Unfortunately, hardly any of the folktales she found were in English. So she started to do some research and rewrote the folktales in English, not for herself specifically, but for her fellow Indonesians who are educated by foreign school systems. She hopes the stories will allow them to minimize their sense of an internal cultural barrier. In addition, she writes this book for students at local schools in the hopes of helping them learn the English language with the ease of familiar stories.

She attended the British International School Jakarta for 12 years before moving to Deerfield Academy, a boarding school in Deerfield, MA, USA, in 2015. In 2014, she participated in a 3-week class at Columbia University for creative writing. Andari is currently in the 10th grade. Reading and writing have always been a large part of her childhood. When Andari was younger, her parents encouraged her to express all her ideas and feelings on paper, whether it is about an activity with friends, or an experience she encountered.