AustLit

Dewi Anggraeni gained a Master of Arts degree in Letters from the University of Indonesia and a Diploma of Education from La Trobe University in Melbourne where she settled. In Australia she has worked as a technical editor, a teacher of English as a Second Language and also as the Australian correspondent for Tempo, a major news and current affairs magazine in Indonesia, as correspondent for the daily English language newspaper, The Jakarta Post and for FORUM Keadilan.

Anggraeni has contributed periodically to INTAN (Indonesian Teachers' Association) Newsletter and AIA News. Minh's Free Country and A Foreigner in East Gippsland, were broadcast on Radio 3CR in 1986. She has been a member of the Fellowship of Australian Writers (FAW). In 1990, she received a Project Assistance Grant from the Victorian Ministry for the Arts.

Anggraeni's fictional terrain is often the ground between cultures : difference as well as connection, misunderstanding but also genuine communication. Some of her characters, like herself, are cultural 'go-betweens' who discover the possibilities and the costs of entering into relationships - personal, social, sexual - outside the comfort zone of their own communities. Her work is finely tuned to the different cultural sensitivities of Indonesia and Australia, and to the need, both in fiction and journalism, to find culturally correct ways of approaching her topics, especially in sensitive areas such as politics and sexual behaviour. Her book, Who Did This to Our Bali? (2003) is a response, both personal and cultural, to the Bali bombings of 12 October 2002.