Recently returned from a trip to Bali, Professor Janet Steele once again participated in the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival. The festival began as a means of helping the island rebuild after the 2002 Bali bombings, and this year marked the event's 10th anniversary. The festival is now Southeast Asia's most renowned literary event.
Professor Steele chaired three sessions, featuring writers from Indonesia, Malaysia and the United Kingdom. Topics ranged from memoirs to fiction writing to investigative reporting. One session of particular interest was a one-on-one discussion with Metta Dharmasaputra, a former journalist of Tempo magazine. Dharmasaputra wrote one of Indonesia's first non-fiction novels, Saksi Kunci, or Key Witness, which is the result of a six-year investigation of the largest tax-evasion scandal in Indonesia's history.
"It's an extraordinary work, and I am very proud to have been involved with helping Metta figure out how to organize and structure the book when he first began writing it back in 2007," Steele says.