Intan Paramaditha Received the Harvard Radcliffe Fellowship 2026-202

Intan Paramaditha

2026–2027

Fiction & Poetry

Walter Jackson Bate Fellow

Macquarie University (Australia)

Intan Paramaditha is an Indonesia-born novelist, scholar, and feminist activist whose work asks how power moves through bodies and borders and what Global South feminist storytelling can do to resist and reimagine. She teaches at Macquarie University, in Sydney, and cofounded the Indonesian trans-archipelagic feminist collective Sekolah Pemikiran Perempuan. Her fiction includes the forthcoming Night of a Thousand Hells (Europa Editions, 2026); The Wandering (Vintage, 2020), longlisted for the Stella Prize and winner of the English PEN Translates award; and Apple and Knife (Brow Books, 2018).

At Radcliffe, Paramaditha is writing “Dinar and Rohana,” an epistolary novel that summons a feminist intellectual history erased in Indonesia after the 1965 anti-communist purge, when hundreds of thousands were killed and members of Gerwani, the largest leftist women’s organization, were vilified and silenced. The novel asks how we become heirs of feminist predecessors whose voices were systematically destroyed. To write this novel is to practice gravedigging: excavating what authoritarianism buried and refusing the erasure of women’s intellectual labor.

Paramaditha holds a PhD from New York University and has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council. She coedited The Routledge Companion to Asian Cinemas (Routledge, 2024) and has published essays in Feminist Review, Film Quarterly, and Visual Anthropology as well as The Best American Travel Writing 2021 (Mariner Books, 2021), Literary Hub, and The Nation. Her fiction has been translated into several languages, including Japanese, Italian, Polish, Thai, and Turkish.