In 2018, the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival celebrates its 15th year as Southeast Asia’s leading festival of words and ideas, so naturally there’ll be a flurry of special festivities to mark the milestone. The celebrations start with the Early Bird tickets, which fly on Monday 16 July, alongside the first announcement of Indonesian and international speakers appearing at this year’s Festival. In this weekly blog series, we’ll share six reasons we think you should be part of the action by purchasing an Early Bird 4-Day Festival Pass.
Reason 6: The first 300 Early Bird ticket buyers will receive a copy of our 2017 Bilingual Anthology of Emerging Indonesian Writing
We recently announced our 2018 Emerging Indonesian Writers. Each year, we put a call out across the archipelago to emerging writers: send us your stories. After receiving hundreds of submissions, an independent curatorial board selects aspiring novelists and poets from across Indonesia’s bustling cities and remote islands.
Once selected, the Emerging Writers are then supported by the Yayasan Mudra Swari Saraswati and the Emerging Writers Patrons to fly to Bali and launch the annual Anthology in front of Indonesian and international audiences at the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival. A bilingual publication, the Anthology also represents a huge opportunity for the Emerging Writers to have their work translated into English, opening the door to international opportunities for the first time.
Selected from almost 900 submissions, the work of the 2017 Emerging Writers is a rich insight into Indonesian language, culture, history and mythology. With many of the submissions relating to the writer’s locality, it is a rare window into some of the archipelago’s little-known regions, such as Maluku and East Nusa Tenggara.
The first 300 Early Bird ticket buyers to exchange their ticket booking confirmation for their 4-Day Festival Pass at the Box Office will receive a copy of the 2017 Bilingual Anthology of Emerging Indonesian Writing. Selamat membaca! Happy reading!