Courtesy of A Kurniawan Ulung

British publishing company Harvill Secker has signed two books by Indonesian writer Intan Paramaditha — short story collection Apple and Knife and a novel in which the readers choose their own narrative path, The Wandering.

Harvill’s senior editor Ellie Steel, who signed the United Kingdom and Commonwealth rights of both books at Asia Literary Agency, praised Intan’s writing as exhilaratingly wild, fun and feminist, while digging deep into different ideas.

Apple and Knife, translated by Stephen J. Epstein and published in Australia and New Zealand by Brow Books, was launched at New Zealand’s Writers and Readers Festival last weekend. The Wandering is a choose-your-own-adventure style novel about traveling the world, in which readers are invited to roam on a path of their own choosing between New York, Berlin, Jakarta, Lima and beyond.

Intan said Apple and Knife tells stories about disobedient women who negotiate with their social structures, while The Wandering engages with the issues of travel, mobility and displacement in our global world.

“While these books are shaped by the cacophony of contemporary Indonesia — fast-moving neoliberal urban spaces, religious conservatism and the legacies of authoritarianism — there are universal questions to share: How do we resist?

What does it mean to cross boundaries?” she says.

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