Talk Session “In a Voice Playful, In a Voice Introspective: A Conversation with Norman Erikson Pasaribu and Paolo Tiausas”

In a Voice Playful, In a Voice Introspective A Conversation with Norman Erikson Pasaribu and Paolo Tiausas

Indonesian queer writer Norman Erickson Pasaribu portrays the complexity of navigating multiple layers of marginalization in the country in a playful and intricate manner. Paolo Tiausas, a Filipino poet, weaves his personal reality into his work, questioning and redefining deeply entrenched concepts of manhood.
Fujii Hikaru, a literary translator, will be in conversation with the two poets to explore the narratives and words that emerge from the interplay among history, tradition, community, religion, identity, and recurring memories associated with them.

Outline

Session title	In a Voice Playful, In a Voice Introspective: A Conversation with Norman Erikson Pasaribu and Paolo Tiausas
Date：	Thursday, October 31, 2024
Time：	3 p.m. – 5 p.m. (Doors open at 2:30 p.m.)
Venue：	Iwasaki Koyata Memorial Hall, The International House of Japan
Language：	English and Japanese（simultaneous interpretation available）
Admission：	Free (registration required) / 100 seats
Registration：	Forms
Organizer：	The Japan Foundation

Profile of Panelists

Norman Erikson Pasaribu

Norman Erikson Pasaribu is a Toba Batak poet and writer. Their first poetry collection, Sergius Mencari Bacchus, won the first prize in the 2015 Jakarta Arts Council Poetry Manuscript Competition, and led them to win the 2017 Sastrawan Muda from the Southeast Asia Literary Council (Mastera). Their book of fiction, Happy Stories, Mostly (tr. Tiffany Tsao), gained international critical acclaim. It won the 2022 Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses, and it was listed for the 2022 International Booker Prize, the 2023 National Book Critics Circle's Barrios Book in Translation, the 2023 National Translation Award for Prose and the 2023 Cercador Prize for Literature in Translation. Norman was the inaugural recipient of the Patricia Kailis International Writing Fellowship and was a Harvard University Asia Center's artist in residence for 2023–2024. They are among the sixteenth descendants of Siraja Bondar of indigenous Toba Batak, North Sumatra. 

Photo by Pauline Reyes

Paolo Tiausas

Paolo Tiausas is a poet and performer. He is the author of Lahat ng Nag-aangas ay Inaagnas [All men ending] (2020) which was a finalist for the 22nd Madrigal-Gonzales Best First Book Award and Tuwing Nag-iisa sa Mapa ng Buntong-hininga [When lonely in the map of sighs] (University of the Philippines Press, 2021). The two books were nominated, respectively, at the 39th and the 40th National Book Awards, with the second one winning the category of Best Book of Poetry in Filipino for that year. In 2021, he was awarded as Makata ng Taón [Poet of the year] by the Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino [Commission for the Filipino language] (KWF). He is a recipient of the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature. Along with Nikay Paredes, he cofounded TLDTD (tldtd.org), a biannual online journal for Filipino poets and poetry. 

Fujii Hikaru (Moderator)

Fujii Hikaru is Associate Professor of Contemporary Literary Studies at the University of Tokyo and author of Outside, America: the Temporary Turn in Contemporary American Fiction (Bloomsbury). His research fields are contemporary American and Anglophone fiction. His resume as a literary translator, which revolves around fiction of war and migration, includes All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, The People of Paper by Salvador Plascencia, Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys, Ling Ma’s Severance, Malay Sketches by Alfian Sa’at, How Much of These Hills Is Gold by C Pam Zhang, and Gina Apostol’s Insurrecto, among others.  

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