Five months into the Corona virus pandemic, people seem to be getting over their griping and groaning and starting to look on the bright side of things. One notable development is the increasing use of the internet for almost all our daily needs. Indonesians are going on-line now not only to order groceries, but even to consult doctors and lawyers.
Remote learning has been applied since the start of the pandemic but only selective schools in “green zones” or less-impacted areas will be allowed to re-open when the new academic year begins in late July. Given the fact that 38% of the country’s 62 million students have no access to the internet and that many of these students live in high-risk districts, this has raised some controversy. There are also those who worry whether the re-opening is coming too soon and might spark a flood of new cases.
The good news is that with more time to spare as a result of less commuting and traveling, people have started to read more. New book clubs are being formed and group discussions are being held through a number of online hosting servers. This is encouraging news for the book industry, even though it means digital publications are on the rise at the expense of the print versions. Book stores report that adult fiction, children’s fiction, and cookbooks are the best-selling genres.
Congratulations are in order for Indonesian recipients of The Sea Write Award, Southeast Asia’s most prestigious literary award, including Nirwan Dewanto for 2018, Eka Kurniawan for 2019, and Leila S. Chudori for 2020. Of the forty Indonesian authors who have won the award since it was first established in 1979, Lontar is proud to have translated and published work by all but two of the authors, most-recently, the novel, Home, by Leila S. Chudori, and Museum of Pure Desire, a collection of poetry, by Nirwan Dewanto. The fact that these authors and the hundreds of other Indonesian authors whose work Lontar has published has very much helped to put Indonesian literature on the world map.
Whether Lontar will be able to continue its work in the months ahead is growing increasingly uncertain. Covid19 has had a severe and negative impact on Lontar’s fund-raising—which is why we feel the need to announce a new Adopt-a-Book campaign. To this end we are looking for a band of angels to help us in this effort. Read about the campaign elsewhere in this newsletter and please, please, give serious consideration to helping us secure Lontar’s ability to continue introducing Indonesian authors to the world’s reading public.
Yuli Ismartono
yismartono@lontar.org