Saturday, October 17, 2026
9:00 a.m. - 10:30 a.m. (GMT+07:00) Yogyakarta
Location: Sanata Dharma University Yogyakarta
Illiberal regimes are increasingly turning to historical memory and heroic national narratives as a source of legitimacy. The political manipulation of memory complicates the work of writers who seek in memory a source of hope, creativity and social and political emancipation. How can both modes of memory, collective and individual, be fruitfully combined? What patterns can we discern across national experiences that span the global North/South divide? Maria Stepanova, Ayu Utami, and Paulus Sarwoto will address these questions in conversation with Samanth Subramanian.
Participants
Maria Stepanova
Maria Stepanova is a poet, essayist, journalist, and author of over 10 poetry collections and three books of essays. Her poetry collections Holy Winter 20/21 (2024) and War of the Beasts and the Animals (2021) were Poetry Book Society Translation Choices and won PEN Translates awards. In 2018, she won the Bolshaya Kniga Award for her novel In Memory of Memory (2021). She has been awarded numerous literary awards, including the Andrey Bely Prize and Joseph Brodsky Fellowship. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the online independent crowd-sourced journal that she founded, Colta.ru, was shut down along with other dissent. A prominent critic of Putin’s regime, she now lives in exile.
Ayu Utami
Ayu Utami is an Indonesian novelist whose work explores social and political questions in contemporary Indonesia, including gender, religion, democracy, and individual freedom. She gained international recognition with her 1998 novel Saman, which examines tensions between tradition and modernity through a feminist lens. Her other works include Larung (2003) and Bilangan Fu (2008). Utami also writes as a cultural commentator and activist, and her work has been translated into multiple languages.
Paulus Sarwoto
Paulus Sarwoto is a professor of comparative literature and the director of the graduate program at Universitas Sanata Dharma, Yogyakarta, Indonesia. His research engages postcolonial comparative literature, with a particular focus on Indonesian/Javanese and English literary traditions. He is currently developing a framework for comparative literature that intersects with cultural studies in the archipelagic context. He holds a Ph.D. from Monash University (2013) and an M.A. from Louisiana State University (2004), both in comparative literature.
Samanth Subramanian
Samanth Subramanian (moderator) is a journalist whose work has appeared in the Guardian, the New Yorker, and the New York Times. His last book, A Dominant Character (2019), was one of the New York Times' Top 100 Books of 2020 and one of the Wall Street Journal's Top 10 Books the same year. His previous books include Following Fish (2010) and This Divided Island (2014), which was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize. His latest book, The Web Beneath the Waves (2025), describes the subsea cable network that brings us the internet, the people who lay these cables, and the people who wish to control them. He lives in London and is the managing editor of Equator.
Accessibility
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