Pramoedya Ananta Toer

Who is Pramoedya Ananta Toer?

Pramoedya Ananta Toer was Indonesia's most internationally acclaimed novelist and a towering figure in Southeast Asian literature. Born in Blora, Central Java, he took part in the independence struggle and was imprisoned by the Dutch. Under Sukarno he became a prominent leftist cultural figure, but after the 1965 upheaval he was detained without trial by the Suharto regime and imprisoned for fourteen years, much of it on the penal island of Buru. Forbidden writing materials, he composed and narrated his masterpiece, the Buru Quartet—'This Earth of Mankind,' 'Child of All Nations,' 'Footsteps,' and 'House of Glass'—orally to fellow prisoners before writing it down. The tetralogy, banned in Indonesia for years, traces the awakening of national consciousness under colonialism. His works have been translated into more than forty languages, and he was frequently mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Sources: Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Bumi Manusia (This Earth of Mankind) (1980) · Pramoedya Ananta Toer, The Mute's Soliloquy: A Memoir (1995; English trans. 1999)