Pramoedya Ananta Toer is read about 221 times a day, in 39 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 13 October 2026
The middle day of the days counted, so one week of news cannot move it. The line under it is the last 79 days, one point a day.
Something wrong?He composed his most famous work by reciting it aloud to fellow prisoners on a remote island, forbidden pen and paper by the same government that once fought for the independence he'd helped imagine into words.
A life in dates
Also in Deutsch
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Awards
In their orbit
Sibling: Soesilo ToerAbout this person
Pramoedya Ananta Toer was born 6 February 1925 and spent much of his life behind bars for what he wrote. Dutch colonial authorities imprisoned him from 1947 to 1949 during the War of Independence. Twenty years later, Suharto's regime locked him up again from 1969 to 1979 on Buru island in Maluku, branding him a Communist even though he'd struggled against the previous government too. Without access to writing materials, he recited the Buru Quartet to other prisoners, who helped smuggle it out. His novels tracked Indonesia from Dutch rule through Japanese occupation to the authoritarian years under Sukarno and Suharto, threaded with personal and national memory. He criticized colonialism, racism, and the corruption of the new state, sometimes subtly, sometimes not. After Buru he lived under house arrest in Jakarta and became a rallying figure for human rights advocates. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature eight times and died 30 April 2006.
In common with Pramoedya
Writers from Indonesia 5
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