Tentang | Bio

Eliza Vitri Handayani is a novelist and artist passionate about achieving a more just society through writing and the arts.

She writes in Indonesian and English. Her novel From Now On Everything Will Be Different (Vagabond Press, 2015) earned her a WrICE fellowship (2016) and invitations to festivals around the world. At the book launches in Oslo and Jakarta, Eliza wore a dress that she had designed and made herself from the novel’s proofs. The novel’s launch at Ubud Writers & Readers Festival was cancelled due to police warnings, and Eliza protested by wearing to the festival T-shirts printed with excerpts from her novel.

Her 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, and others.

She is also the creator of InterSastra literary and arts community; House of the Unsilenced, an art project that matched artists with sexual abuse survivors to create new works and speak up together for gender justice (2018); and Fashion ForWords, an innovative fashion showcase that used clothes and the body to speak out against oppression (2019). She also co-founded As-Salam Collective, which held study sessions to relearn Islam from feminist perspectives; the collective also created the fashion collection Indonesian Muslim Looks (2019). Also in 2019 she designed the Anti-Censorship Dress, collaborating with designer Ayudilamar. In 2020 she mentored a group of trans women from Jakarta to write their stories and adapt them into short performance films.

Read some of her works at elizavitri.com, and greet her on Instagram or Twitter @elizavitri