Jakarta – Indonesia's most celebrated novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer has died at the age of 81, his family said. Relatives said Pramoedya died at his East Jakarta home at 8.55 am Sunday.
A relative who identified himself as Gunawan said Pramoedya had been hospitalized since Thursday for heart and other problems associated with advanced age but on Saturday evening had insisted on returning home. The exact cause of death was not clear, though one of his grandchildren, Adit, said he believed Pramoedya died of a stroke.
Pramoedya is best known for his "Buru Quartet" series retracing the rise of Indonesian nationalism in the first decades of the 20th century, a version differed from that of the government at the time. Hailed by many international critics as Indonesia's leading modern novelist, his work has been translated into 30 languages.
Under the staunchly anti-communist Suharto, almost all his work was banned in Indonesia, where he spent many years in jail under three successive rulers. Suharto's fall in 1998 ended the political taboo surrounding his work and Pramoedya, his health fast detoriating and unable to write any longer, saw his books reappear in bookstores across the country.
The novelist, essayist and short story writer was nominated several times for the Nobel prize for literature, first in 1986, and was last year the only Indonesian to appear on a list of 100 leading intellectuals named by Britain's cultural Prospect magazine.
While Pramoedya never openly declared his political allegiances, he was accused of being a communist by Suharto, who in 1965 banned the then powerful Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) after a failed coup attempt and launched a campaign against sympathisers that left at least 500,000 dead and saw over one million arbitrarily arrested and jailed.
Pramoedya wrote eight of his novels, including the Buru tetralogy, during his 10-year stay at the infamous Buru island labor camp where he was sent after four years of detention at various other jails. Thousands of alleged communist members and supporters were also incarcerated on the island without trial.
His first jail term, under the Dutch colonial administration, was in 1947-1949 for agitating for independence through the media. The country's first president Sukarno imprisoned him once more between 1960 and 1961 for publishing a book that criticized his policies concerning ethnic Chinese, while Suharto jailed him without trial from 1965 until 1979.
His mastery of colloquial language added realism to his novels, and the alleged leftist tenor of his works angered Suharto. After his release from Buru, he remained under close government surveillance until 1992, and was only able to leave the country after Suharto's fall.
In and out of jail, Pramoedya was a prolific writer, producing 37 novels, seven non-fiction books, a dozen translations, scores of short stories and three anthologies of poetry.
He received various awards including France's Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and the Japanese Fukuoka Asian Culture Grand Prize, both in 2000.
He also received the 1995 Ramon Magsasay Award for Journalism, Literature and Creative Communication Arts and, in 1992, the PEN Freedom to Write Award.