Budi Darma

Budi Darma was a novelist, short-story-writer, and literary critic. Budi Darma received several national literary awards and his international honors include the Southeast Asian Writers Award (or S.E.A. Write Award) and the Mastera Literary Award. He held a PhD in English literature from the University of Bloomington, Indiana, and was a professor at the State University of Surabaya.

About the Translator

Tiffany Tsao has authored three novels: The Oddfits (Amazon Crossing 2016), The More Known World (Amazon Crossing 2017), and most recently, the standalone book The Majesties. The Majesties has been published in Australia (Viking 2018), the US (Atria Books 2020), the UK (Pushkin Vertigo 2020), and translated into Italian (Astoria Edizioni 2020). Her writing has been published in outlets such as Electric Literature, The Margins, CrimeReads, Korean Literature Now, and Sydney Review of Books. She was longlisted for the 2019 Ned Kelly Award—Australia’s leading prize for crime fiction.

In addition to being a writer, she is an acclaimed translator of Indonesian fiction and poetry. She has translated three published books to date, was awarded the PEN Presents Prize and PEN Translates grant in the UK, and was shortlisted for the biennial NSW Premier’s Translation Prize—Australia’s foremost prize for literary translation, and was longlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize for Norman Erikson Pasaribu’s Happy Stories, Mostly. She spent her formative years in Singapore and Indonesia before moving to the United States, where she completed her B.A. in English from Wellesley College and her Ph.D. in English from UCBerkeley. In 2011, she moved to Sydney, Australia, where she now lives with her husband, two small children who claim they are dinosaurs, and the family’s faithful sourdough starter, Mr. Fizz