Ika Natassa

Ika Natassa is a banker, writer, and an aspiring photographer. After her internships in Australia’s Department of Primary Industry and Fisheries in Darwin and ACTEW Corporation Limited in Canbera, she joined Bank Mandiri in 2002 and has been climbing the corporate ladder in this company ever since. In 2008, she was awarded with The Best Change Agent at Bank Mandiri for her active role in corporate culture implementation in the bank. She was recently awarded for 2010 Best Employee Award at her company.

A Very Yuppy Wedding, her first book, was the Editor’s Choice of Cosmopolitan Indonesia magazine in 2008, the same year that she was nominated as the Talented Young Writer in the prestigious Khatulistiwa Literary Award. In 2011, she started exploring the storytelling possibilities through social media, and in 2012, she released Twivortiare, the first fiction in Indonesia written entirely through Twitter.

In 2004, she was one of the ten finalists of Cosmopolitan magazine Fun Fearless Female. She was also awarded with the title Women Icon from The Marketeers in 2010. In the same year, she finally decided to self-publish her first book Underground – an English novel – with the assistance of Indonesia’s first and only self-publishing company Nulisbuku.com. Also with Nulisbuku, she supports the Writers 4 Indonesia project which publishes collections of stories and essays from Indonesia’s prominent and new authors, donating the whole royalty payments from the books for the recovery of disaster victims in Merapi, Wasior, and Mentawai.