SIDELINES: Thought Pieces from TEMPO Magazine
By Goenawan Mohamad and translated by Jennifer Lindsay

In Sidelines, Goenawan Mohamad reveals an Indonesia which exists beyond the headlines. He writes about identity and change, democracy and freedom, and the meaning of history.

This book gives and unrivalled insight into a complex country with a many-layered past. It introduces to Western readers a man of great charm, humor, sophistication, a great lover of words and a lover of truth.

About the author
Goenawan Mohamad was born in 1941 in Batang, Central Java, where he was educated at the village primary school and local high school. When he was eighteen he moved to Jakarta where he studied psychology and philosophy at the University of Indonesia and began writing for the literary magazine Sastra.
In 1965 he was awarded a scholarship to the Collège d’Europe in Bruges, Belgium. In 1970 he also helped establish a weekly newsmagazine Ekspres , but within a year he was dismissed due to a disagreement with the publisher over the government's interference with the journalist union. A year later he founded Tempo and stayed on as the editor until it was closed by the Soeharto government in 1994.
    In addition to several volumes of essays, including Catatan Pinggir (volumes I to III, from which the essays in this book were drawn), Goenawan has published a number of volumes of poetry. In 1993 was presented the first Professor A. Teeuw Award in the Netherlands, and in 2001 was named a Regent Professor at University of California at Berkeley.


About the translator
Jennifer Lindsay has spent twenty years in Indonesia, including periods working as Cultural Counselor for Australia in Indonesia and program officer at the Ford Foundation’s Jakarta office. She has taught Southeast Asian performance and Javanese gamelan at Cornell University and the University of Sydney. She writes on Javanese performing arts; cultural policy in Southeast Asia; language policy and use in broadcast media in Indonesia; translation; and interrelationships between language, translation and performance.