OkkyMadasari.net

BIOGRAPHY

Okky Puspa Madasari known as Okky Madasari is an Indonesian novelist and sociologist. She received her PhD from the National University of Singapore (NUS) with a thesis about knowledge production and censoship in Indonesia in 2024, and her Master degree in sociology from the University of Indonesia in 2014.

Okky is well-known for her social criticism with works highlighting social issues, such as injustice and discrimination, and above all, about humanity.  In academic field, her main interest is on literature, censorship and freedom of expression, and sociology of knowledge.

Since 2010 Okky has published 10 books, comprising of five novels, one short story collection, three children's novels and one non-fiction book. Her 10th book is titled "Genealogi Sastra Indonesia: Kapitalisme, Islam dan Sastra Perlawanan" (Genealogy of Indonesian Literature: Capitalism, Islam and Critical Literature) which was published online in December 2019, and can be freely downloaded and printed in this website. The book is attempting to track the origins, forces and idealogies that shape today's Indonesian novels. 

She also regularly writes for Indonesian and international media on issues in line with her interests and focuses reflected in her fiction and her academic works.

Literary Works

Her first novel Entrok (2010), an epic about life under totalitarian and militarism during the Indonesia's New Order era, has been translated into English and was published in July 2013 under the title of The Years of the Voiceless. Her three subsequent novels, 86 (highlighting tentacles of corruption within the heart of Indonesian society, published in 2011), Maryam (the life of banned minority Islamic sect in Indonesia in 2012) and Pasung Jiwa (about transgender within a society sliding towards fundamentalism in 2013), have also been translated into English under the title of 86, The Outcast and Bound respectively. Pasung Jiwa has also been translated into German under the title of Gebunden in 2015 and in 2019 into Arabic in Egypt. In 2016, she published Kerumunan Terakhir which describes about the influence of social media on Indonesian young Indonesians. It was translated into English and published under a title of The Last Crowd. She then published her first anthology of short stories titled Yang Bertahan dan Binasa Perlahan (Resisting and Fading Away) in 2017.

Watching her daughter growing with not many good Indonesian children books available, Okky committed herself to write children novels, and in 2018 she published Mata di Tanah Melus (Mata in the land of Melus), the first book of Mata series, which describe the adventure of 12-year-old Matara and her mother across Indonesian archipelago on the background of the country’s rich cultural and historical rich. Mata di Tanah Melus itself tells Mata’s experience in entering fantasy world of Melus people in East Nusa Tenggara.

Several months after, she published the second of the series titled Mata dan Rahasia Pulau Gapi which tells how Mata and her friends are trying to save great legacies of North Maluku’s Ternate islands, where great British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace once lived and corresponded with Charles Darwin. In early 2019 the third book of the series, Mata… more