Bio

I am a writer, translator, scholar, and theater performer who moves between poetry, translation, research, and performance. I was born in Indonesia and now live in Brussels, carrying with me the languages, histories, and sensibilities that shaped me. My work grows in the spaces where cultures meet, where texts speak to one another, and where meaning shifts every time a word crosses a border.

I write poems and stories, and I translate the voices of La Fontaine, Hugo, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and other canonical authors into Indonesian. What draws me to classical and contemporary texts is the way they echo across time. When I translate them, I try to let their melancholy, humor, and beauty resonate with readers today while staying faithful to the pulse of each language.

As a scholar of comparative literature, I explore how texts travel, how myths reappear in new contexts, and how literary imagination is shaped by movement between cultures. My work on transcultural intertextuality and transnational literary reception has been published internationally and continues to guide my research. I am interested in the subtle connections that make literature a global conversation.

On stage, I bring text into the body. I perform in Indonesian, Javanese, and French, letting rhythm, breath, and emotion carry the language. Performing allows me to return literature to voice, to presence, to an encounter that is shared with an audience. It is where my analytical and artistic sides meet.

My published works include Melankolia – Poems in Five Languages (2020), the novella Miss Gawky (2020), Puisi Fabel (2021), a translation of selected fables by Jean de La Fontaine, and Poetry as Autobiography (2023). I also published Bunga-Bunga Iblis (2024), my translation of Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal. Forthcoming works include Reading Wing Kardjo in the Trajectory of French Literature and Transcultural Intertextuality: Theory and Practice Analysis, a reference book that develops a model for intercultural literary analysis.

My poem “Pada Pemilu” (The Election) received one of the Best Poem Award at the 7th Anniversary of Bawaslu – Indonesia (2025). My short story “Cakar Dubuk Tutul” (Hyena’s Claw) was selected among Kompas’s Best Short Stories of 2021, and “Bulan Biru di Laut Flores” (Blue Moon over the Flores Sea) received the Readers’ Choice Award in the 2021 Literary Tourism Competition held by Yayasan Pustaka Obor and Rayakultura. My essay “Madame Bovary: The Death of Romanticism in Flaubert’s Hands” was nominated for Best Literary Essay at the Sastra Media Awards 2022.

I open my practice to collaboration with writers, scholars, translators, and performers around the world. I enjoy giving lectures, teaching creative writing and literary translation, leading workshops, and working on cross-cultural artistic projects. My hope is always the same: to create spaces where literature, translation, and performance find each other, and where people from different cultures can meet through language.