Mantra for Attacking the City

Reading Manna’s collection of poetry is a very orally and aurally therapeutic process. His free-verse and continuously repetitive rhythm and movement intertwines familiar images of Indonesia, in particular of Manna’s home city Surabaya. Simultaneously, he treats language in a way that evokes very unusual and sensory moments for the reader.

• F. Aziz Manna, Author

  F Aziz Manna was born in Surabaya, East Java in 1978 and graduated from the Department of Cultural Studies at Airlangga University. He has published several collections of poetry, of which one, titled Playon, received the 2016 Khatulistiwa Award, Indonesia’s top literary prize for poetry.

• John H. McGlynn, Translator

  John H. McGlynn has translated several dozen publications under his own name, and through the Lontar Foundation, which he co-founded in 1987, has ushered into print close to two hundred books on Indonesian language, literature, and culture. He is the Indonesian country editor for MĀNOA, a literary journal published by the University of Hawai'i Press the senior editor for I-Lit, an on-line journal focusing on Indonesian literature in translation; a contributing editor to Words Without Borders and Warscapes, U.S. based literary journals; and an editor advisor for Jurnal Sastra, an Indonesian-language on-line journal. He is also a frequent speaker at seminars both in Indonesia and abroad.