Celebrated Indonesian author Ayu Utami, a pioneer of women’s erotica in Indonesia, and Fogarty Award-winner Rebecca Higgie will share stage and screen with Professor Krishna Sen to explore the use of mythical characters and magic realism in Australian and Indonesian literature. How can these literary tools help us to reveal and investigate personal and national histories?

Ayu Utami received the 2000 Prince Claus Award and the 2018 Ahmad Bakrie Award for Literature. During Indonesia’s military regime, she was a journalist and activist for freedom of the press. She was one of the founders of the Alliance of Independent Journalists. Her first novel, Saman, became a beacon of freedom during the movement for political change in Indonesia.

Rebecca Higgie is a writer from Perth. Her whole life has been spent in the company of books, with careers in libraries and universities. Formerly an academic at Curtin University and Brunel University London, she has published research on satire and politics. She has worked in the stacks of the State Library of Western Australia and fostered childhood literacy as the Library Officer at Guildford Primary, WA’s oldest public school. Her creative work combines whimsy and play with extensive research and critical insights. Her novel The History of Mischief won the 2019 Fogarty Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript.

Krishna Sen is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and Professor Emerita and Senior Research Fellow in the School of Humanities at UWA. She is an internationally recognized scholar of contemporary Indonesia and media studies and has published many books and papers in her specialist fields. She has held teaching, research and leadership positions at Murdoch, Curtin, UWA and the Australian Research Council (ARC). Krishna is Indian by birth, Australian by choice. As a polyglot, she is able to enjoy literary works in several Asian languages including English.