Tentang | Bio

Hi. My name is Eliza Vitri Handayani, I’m a novelist and artistic director from Jakarta, Indonesia. I write in Indonesian and English. I love writing about rebellious young people, and am passionate about achieving a more inclusive society through writing and the arts.

My novel From Now On Everything Will Be Different (Vagabond Press, 2015) earned me a Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange (WrICE) fellowship in 2016 and invitations to literary festivals around the world. At the book launches in Oslo and Jakarta, I wore a dress that I’d designed and made myself from the novel’s proofs. The novel’s launch at Ubud Writers & Readers Festival was cancelled due to police warnings, and I protested by wearing to the festival T-shirts printed with excerpts from the novel.

My short stories, personal essays, and articles have been published in diverse international outlets, such as Story, Griffith Review, Kill Your Darlings, Asia Literary Review, Koran Tempo, Jakarta Post, Magdalene, Exchanges Journal, Words Without Borders, Inside Indonesia, Index on Censorship, and the anthologies The Near and the Far volume 2, BooksActually’s Gold Standard, Heat Flesh Trash, Queer etc., and others.

I’m also the founder of InterSastra literary and arts community. Through InterSastra, I produced 3 arts projects. House of the Unsilenced (2018) paired 50 survivors of sexual violence with 37 artists, performers, and writers and created new artworks and performances to speak up for gender justice. For Fashion ForWords (2019), 35 designers, models, activists, garment factory workers, and members of the LGBTQIA+ communities created an innovative fashion showcase that explored how to speak up with our clothes when our words are censored. For Ceritrans: Trans Stories Transcending Borders (2021), I mentored 10 trans women in the greater Jakarta area to write, publish, and film their life stories, collaborating with 20 writers, actors, film crew, designers, translators, and other creatives. Also through InterSastra, I edited the bilingual literary series Diverse Indonesia (2015), Defiant Voices (2017), and Unrepressed (2017-2020). In 2019, collaborating with designer Ayudilamar, I designed the Anti-Censorship Dress.

Together with other members of As-Salam Collective, I held study sessions to relearn Islam from feminist perspectives, under the guidance of Professor Musdah Mulia. The collective also created the fashion collection Indonesian Muslim Looks (2019) to help disseminate the things we’ve learned in the study club.

As an artistic director, I’ve been building relationships and conducting workshops with underrepresented communities to facilitate their members to write their stories, create artistic works based on those stories, and disseminate those works through innovative means to break barriers, claim space, and nurture empathy across segments of society.

I believe in the power of stories to transform lives and society. I believe the more people are capable of self-representation, the more we heed the voices of underrepresented groups, the more just our society will be.

If you’d like to work together, please send me a message here.

You may also say hi to me on Instagram at @elizavitri.

AWARDS, GRANTS, SCHOLARSHIPS & FELLOWSHIPS

• 3 fully sponsored residencies in Australia and Indonesia as part of the International Arts Leaders program (Australia Council for the Arts, 2019-2020)
• Selected as one of 50 Indonesian women arts workers to join Peretas community and gather in Mosintuwu Institute, Poso, to share experiences and strengthen one another (2019)
• Writer’s residency grant in Australia (the Indonesian National Book Committee, 2018)
• Writers’ Immersion and Cultural Exchange (WrICE) fellowship in China and Australia (RMIT University, Australia, 2016-2017)
• Translation grant for the novel From Now On Everything Will Be Different (the Indonesian National Book Committee, 2014)
• Pushcart Prize nomination from Asymptote Journal (2013)
• Full scholarship to attend Wesleyan University, USA (Freeman Foundation, 2000-2005). Read Wesleyan Students for Justice in Palestine (WesleyanSJP)’s statement (February 2024). Read Wesleyan Alumni for Justice in Palestine’s call for the university to “withdraw baseless and punitive disciplinary charges in the interest of the livelihoods of student activists [who rallied in support of Palestine] and the future of free speech and political expression on Wesleyan’s campus” (September 2024).
• Scholarships to participate in the Wesleyan Writers Conference (Wesleyan University, 2004, 2006)
• Adikarya Award for Best Young Adult Book, for the novel Area X: Hymne Angkasa Raya (the Indonesian Publishers Association, 2004)
• Best Action Script for Film/TV (the Indonesian National Film Center, 1999)