The international profile of Indonesian literature continues to grow. Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Ayu Utami and Intan Paramaditha, for example, are now globally-recognised authors, and both Eka Kurniawan and Norman Erikson Pasaribu have been longlisted for the International Booker Prize in recent years. This increasing recognition is mainly thanks to the now wide availability of excellent translations into English, not least through the activities of the Lontar Foundation in Jakarta.
The AIS would like to announce the formation of the Anglo Indonesian Society Book Club. This online book club will run initially for one year as a pilot project, with meetings every three months on Zoom. The “unique selling point” will be the selection for each meeting of a work of Indonesian literature, which can be read either in the Indonesian original or in English translation. However the online book club discussion will be solely in English, in order to promote Indonesian literature to a broader audience.
The club will be led by Ian Rowland, and is open to all AIS members. The first evening meeting will be held on Wednesday 13 September 2023 from 8pm-8.40pm London time, which will discuss the novel Lelaki Harimau/Man Tiger by Eka Kurniawan. If you are interested in joining, please contact Ian by email: rowland@myphone.coop
| Lelaki Harimau (2014) tells the story of two interlinked families in an Indonesian coastal town, and Margio, a young man who conceals within him a supernatural female white tiger, and who has committed a murder. The tiger becomes the focus of family betrayals. Man Tiger could be described as a crime novel, but one in which we know the protagonist from the very beginning. The English translation, Man Tiger, is by Labodalih Sembiring and first appeared in 2015. Man Tiger is available from Amazon and other online retailers: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Man-Tiger-Novel-Eka-Kurniawan/dp/1781688591 Lelaki Harimau is available on various Indonesian online sites but it may not be easy to deliver to UK https://www.tokopedia.com/find/lelaki-harimau |