Linus Suryadi

One of Indonesian contemporary poets. He learned his writing in the Malioboro Street School, a guerilla art school founded by Umbu Landu Paranggi in Yogyakarta. His famous work was “Pengakuan Pariyem” in 1981 which written as lyric prose. His best contribution to Indonesian literary were collecting and compiling contemporary Indonesian poetries into “Tonggak”,¹ Antologi Puisi Indonesia Modern (The Beginning: Anthology of Modern Indonesian Poetry), a four-volume set of Indonesian poetry that spans 60 years, from the 1920s to the 1980s.

Linus Suryadi studied at IKIP Sanata Dharma and began publishing poems and essays while still in his late teens. He studied English in college but left before completion, and worked on various newspapers and magazines in Yogyakarta. According to Harry Aveling, Suryadi’s prose-lyric Pengakuan Pariyem (Pariyem’s Confession) attracted considerable attention for its bold use of Javanese words and phrases. In Pengakuan Pariyem, Suryadi describes the life of a female servant of a noble family which is limited by the traditions of the court town of Yogyakarta. Even though this prose poem was hailed as a penetrating analysis of culture that reveals Javanese social life, Niels Mulder suggests that it is basically an idealization of a system of values that belongs to the past.

In 1982, Linus Suryadi AG studied at the International Writing Program in Iowa in the U.S. He was a member of the Yogyakarta Arts Council and was the editor of Citra Yogya, a journal of art and culture.²

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2. Wikipedia ↩