About
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Bio bahasa indonesia
Intan Paramaditha is an Indonesian author and a Senior Lecturer in Media and Film Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney. She received her Ph.D (with distinction) from New York University in 2014. Her fiction, academic, and activist works focus on structures of power, politics of travel, circulation, and mobility, as well as anti-colonial feminist knowledge production.
Her novel The Wandering (Harvill Secker/ Penguin Random House UK, 2020), translated from the Indonesian language by Stephen J. Epstein, was longlisted for the Stella Prize in Australia and awarded the Tempo Best Literary Fiction in Indonesia, the English PEN Translates Award, and the PEN/ Heim Translation Fund Grant from PEN America. She is the author of the feminist horror short story collection Apple and Knife (2018) and the editor of Deviant Disciples: Indonesian Women Poets, part of the Translating Feminisms series of Tilted Axis Press in the UK. Her essay, “On the Complicated Questions Around Writing About Travel,” was selected for The Best American Travel Writing 2021. Her fiction work has been translated into English, Polish, Turkish, German, and Thai.
Paramaditha’s latest work is the Islamic-gothic novel Malam Seribu Jahanam (Gramedia Pustaka Utama, 2023), currently being translated into English. She was the winner of the Kompas Best Short Story Award in 2013, shortlistee of the Khatulistiwa Literary Award (2005; 2017), and the co-author of horror anthology Kumpulan Budak Setan (The Devil’s Slaves Club, 2010), with Eka Kurniawan and Ugoran Prasad.
Academic work
Prior to her appointment at Macquarie University, she taught at the University of Indonesia and Sarah Lawrence College. Her scholarly articles have appeared in journals such as Feminist Review, Visual Anthropology, Film Quarterly, Asian Cinema, Jump Cut, Social Identities, and Inter-Asia Cultural Studies as well as edited volumes such as Southeast Asian Independent Cinema, Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures and Dictionnaire des femmes créatrices. She is the co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Asian Cinemas (forthcoming 2024) with Zhang Zhen, Debashree Mukherjee, and Sangjoon Lee.
She has received awards and fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, Mellon/ American Council of Learned Societies, NYU Jay Leyda Award for Academic Excellence, American Association of University Women, and Fulbright. She was a visiting scholar at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) and is part of the Association for Southeast Asian Cinemas Conference (ASEACC).
Invited talks
Paramaditha has given talks as an invited speaker at literary/ arts festivals and academic forums. As a writer, she has been invited to literary events and festivals including Sydney Writers’ Festival, Broadside Feminist Ideas Festival/ Melbourne, New Zealand Festival, Europalia Arts Festival in Brussels, English PEN literary salon, London Book Fair, Frankfurt Book Fair, Litprom Literaturtage, Paisley Book Festival Scotland, Jakarta International Literary Festival, Singapore Writers Festival, George Town Literary Festival, Hong Kong International Writers Festival, and Conrad Festival, Kraków.
She has also been invited to give a lecture at Harvard University, Yale University, University of Hawaii, New York University, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), Leiden University, Goethe University Frankfurt, University of Minnesota, University of Melbourne, and University of Sydney.
Paramaditha has been a Writer-in-Residence at the Asia Creative Writing Programme Nanyang Technological University Singapore, Life at Springfield (supported by The Stella Prize), Literarisches Colloquium Berlin (virtual).
Cultural activism
She is the co-founder of Sekolah Pemikiran Perempuan (SPP), a feminist initiative that creates interventions in knowledge production by situating “Third World” women as knowing subjects as form of “epistemic disobedience” to the colonial, capitalist, and heteropatriarchal knowledge system. Since 2019, SPP has organized the feminist festival Etalase Pemikiran Perempuan (ETALASE).
Paramaditha has also been involved in other projects of cultural activism such as Period and Makassar International Writers Festival.
Essays
Her writings can be found in, among others, Sydney Review of Books, Literary Hub, Electric Literature, Asian American Writers Workshop, The Jakarta Post, and Korean Literature Now. She wrote a foreword to Budi Darma’s short story collection People from Bloomington (2022), translated by Tiffany Tsao and published by Penguin Classics (reprinted in The Nation).
