About
Please read here for a short bio
Bio bahasa Indonesia
Intan Paramaditha is an Indonesian-born author and academic whose creative and scholarly work examines structures of power and resistance, travel and mobility, and decolonial feminist knowledge production. Her debut novel The Wandering (Harvill Secker, 2020, translated by Stephen J. Epstein) was longlisted for the Stella Prize in Australia and received the English PEN Translates Award. Her short story collection Apple and Knife, which reimagines horror and fairy tales through a feminist lens, is part of the Vintage Classics “Weird Girls” series. Her fiction has been translated into English, Japanese, Polish, Turkish, Thai, and Italian. Her latest novel, Malam Seribu Jahanam (Night of a Thousand Hells), which blends Gothic and Islamic elements with Asian folk tales to critique violence embedded in middle-class culture, will be published by Europa Editions (UK/US) and Scribe (Australia) in Autumn 2026, in a translation by Stephen J. Epstein and Tiffany Tsao.
Paramaditha holds a Ph.D. from New York University and serves as Senior Lecturer in Media and Film Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney. She is the co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Asian Cinemas (with Zhang Zhen, Sangjoon Lee, and Debashree Mukherjee). She edited Deviant Disciples: Indonesian Women Poets for Tilted Axis Press’ Translating Feminism series, and her essay was selected for The Best American Travel Writing 2021. Her scholarly articles appear in journals including Feminist Review, Film Quarterly, Visual Anthropology, and Inter-Asia Cultural Studies as well as numerous edited volumes.
She has received the Tempo Best Literary Fiction and Kompas Best Short Story awards and was shortlisted for the Khatulistiwa Literary Award in 2005 and 2017. She was a writer in residence at the Asia Creative Writing Programme at Nanyang Technological University Singapore and is a recipient of the 2025–2026 Civitella Ranieri Fellowship. She has also received awards and fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, the Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies, the American Association of University Women, Fulbright, and New York University’s Jay Leyda Award for Academic Excellence.
Paramaditha has been profiled in, among others, The Guardian, BBC Radio 4, ABC News, ABC Radio National, South China Morning Post, Nikkei Asian Review, The Straits Times, China Daily, Sydney Morning Herald, and The Jakarta Post. Her writing appears in The Sydney Review of Books, Literary Hub, Electric Literature, and Asian American Writers Workshop. She wrote the foreword to Budi Darma’s short story collection People from Bloomington (Penguin Classics, 2022), also published in The Nation.
She has delivered keynote speeches and lectures at the Conrad Festival Award Gala, Triennial Australian Literary Studies Convention, and Harvard University. She has been invited to international literary events including the Sydney Writers’ Festival, Broadside Feminist Ideas Festival in Melbourne, Europalia Arts Festival in Brussels, London Book Fair, New Zealand Festival, Singapore Writers Festival, and Hong Kong International Literary Festival. She has also given lectures at the University of Minnesota, University of Hawaii, Yale University, University of Sydney, Australian National University, Leiden University, Goethe University, École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), and the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology.
Paramaditha co-founded Sekolah Pemikiran Perempuan (SPP), a trans-archipelagic feminist collective working to challenge colonial, capitalist, and heteropatriarchal knowledge production by advancing feminist perspectives from the Indonesian archipelago and the Global South. SPP organises an annual feminist school and the ETALASE feminist festival.