About

I came to Southeast Asia in the late 1970s as a backpacker and, by a sequence of accidents that seemed improbable even at the time, ended up supervising an oil-field survey crew in the forests of East Kalimantan. By the time that job ended, Indonesia had made the larger decision for me: there was enough here to sustain a lifetime of writing.

Since then I have lived in Bandung, Jakarta, Bogor, Bali and Yogyakarta, and travelled widely through the archipelago. The places changed, but the subject remained much the same — how people make lives inside the larger currents of history, economics, belief, culture and politics.

My earliest books were travel titles, including East Kalimantan and Yogyakarta for Times Editions. Later work moved toward longer narrative accounts of contemporary Indonesia. Jakarta Jive grew out of the economic crisis and the collapse of President Soeharto’s three-decade rule in 1998. Bali Blues followed life in Kuta after the 2002 bombing and the sudden collapse of the tourism economy on which so many people depended.

I have also worked on collaborative and commissioned books. These include Witnessing Affandi, based on the memories of Suhardjono, Affandi’s longtime driver and assistant; and “Outsiders”, a chapter in A History of Photography in Indonesia: From the Colonial Era to the Digital Age.

Alongside books, I have written essays, magazine and newspaper pieces, scripts and editorial material, and worked with Indonesian businesses, cultural organisations and social institutions. Across all of it, the aim is the same: clear English, close observation, respect for the people being written about, and enough context to make Indonesia intelligible without flattening its contradictions.

I live in Yogyakarta.