Jakarta – Leftist author Pramudya Ananta Toer hailed by international critics as Indonesia's leading modern novelist but gagged here until the fall of Suharto, is travel abroad for the first time in 40 years, Fordham University said Monday.
Pramudya, 74, who has been nominated for the Nobel prize will leave here April 4 for his first tour of the United States which will also take him to Canada, the university said in a press statement. It will be the first time he has left the country since 1959.
At the invitation of Fordham and the Association of American Publishers, Pramudya will take part in a seminar on his work marking the launch of the English language edition of his work, 'The Mute's Soliloquy,' the statement said.
Most of the ageing novelist's work was banned for decades in Indonesia, where he spent a great part of his life in jail.
Born to a modest family in Blora, a small town in the northeastern coast of Central Java, Pramudya was a thorn in the side of successive adminstrations.
During Indonesia's independence struggle against the Dutch, the colonial administration threw him in jail from 1947 to 1949.
The country's first president Sukarno imprisoned him between 1960 and 1961 for writing about the Chinese in Indonesia.
In the 1960s, Pramudya was one of the main figures of Lekra, a communist-affiliated art organisation which harshly suppressed liberal writers, through the media outlets under its control at the time.
Under the Suharto government his links to the communists landed him in jail without trial for 14 years following a bloody 1965 coup attempt, officially blamed on the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI).
He spent years at the notorious Buru Island prison labour camp, and the decade following his release from Buru in 1979 under house surveillance.
In 1996 Pramudya was questioned over his possible links with a pro-democracy group, the People's Democractic Party (PRD), which was deemed to be pro-communist at the time.
Pramudya never showed any remorse for his past or his communist links, and in May 1987, the government barred him from accepting an invitation to attend the Pen Club congress in Lugano, Switzerland.
He was nominated to the Nobel Prize for literature for the first time in 1986. It went to Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka and although nominated several times since, the coveted prize has eluded him.
In May 1995 Pramudya was awarded the Ramon Magsasay Award for Journalism, Literature and Creative Communication Arts, an annual Manila-based award encompassing Asia.
Several authors and intellectuals harshly protested Pramudya's nomination for the award citing his suppression of liberal wiritings while under Lekra, and Jakarta again barred him from leaving the country to accept the prize.
He wrote eight of his novels during his stay at the infamous Buru island prison where thousands of alleged communist members and supporters were jailed without trial.
His "The Earth of Mankind" and "Greenhouse", part of a tetralogy retracing the rise of Indonesian nationalism at the turn of the century, was translated in eight languages, including English, Dutch, German, Swedish, Russian and Chinese.