Iwan Simatupang

Iwan Simatupang was born in 1928 in North Sumatra and was an Indonesian novelist, poet and essayist. After involvement in the resistance against the colonial power, his arrest and release, he continued his studies in The Netherlands and France. He wrote his first novel, Ziarah (The Pilgrim) in a month in 1960; the work was published in Indonesia in 1969, and was awarded the First ASEAN Literary Award for the Novel in Bangkok in 1977. He also wrote Merahnya Merah (Red in Red) which received the National Literary Award in 1970 and Kering (Drought) in 1972. According to Benedict Richard O’Gorman Anderson, Iwan Simatupang and Putu Wijaya are the two “genuinely distinguished fictionalists” produced by Indonesia since Independence both with a strong attachment to “magical realism”.