Saut Situmorang

Born in North Sumatera of Indonesia but raised in its capital Medan, spent eleven years (1989-2000) as an immigrant in New Zealand where he did his BA in English Literature and MA in Indonesian Literature. He was also actively involved in the underground poetry readings in New Zealand and was awarded several prizes for his English-language poetry, such as the Original Composition Prize from Victoria University of Wellington and the Blues Award from the University of Auckland. He returned to Indonesia in 2000 and now lives in the city of Yogyakarta as a writer, widely published in newspapers and literary magazines all over Indonesia. He has published five books of poems, a book of literary essays, and a book of short stories. His Indonesian-language poems and short stories have been translated into English, Italian, Czech, French and German. He is one of the pioneers of Internet Literature in Indonesia and at present is one of the editors of the Indonesian underground literary journal boemipoetra. From 2005 to 2007 he was the Literature curator for the Festival Kesenian Yogyakarta (Yogyakarta Arts Festival) in Indonesia. He was one of the curators for What Is Poetry?-International Poetry Festival Indonesia 2012. A familiar name in the literary scene in Indonesia, he was invited to the book-launch of a selection of his poems translated into French at the Unesco, Paris in November 2012. He was invited to South Africa, Zimbabwe and Germany in 2013. And in 2015 he was invited as a guest poet to the 3 Cities Poetry Festival (Bandung, Yogyakarta, Denpasar) in Indonesia.¹

1. Tupelo Quarterly ↩