“In order to fit into certain ideals, you need to mutilate yourself,” Paramaditha says.Īs a child, she was surrounded by books (“I grew up as a nerd”) and is now as comfortable discussing Shakespeare and The Wizard of Oz as she is Indonesian folk tales, which are rich with tales of travel. To escape their control, she is forced to have her feet amputated, just as Cinderella’s stepsister – who also appears in one of Paramaditha’s stories in Apple and Knife – cuts off her toe to fit into a different but equally fateful pair of shoes. Her source of inspiration is Hans Christian Andersen’s story The Red Shoes, in which a young girl finds herself trapped by dancing footwear. In The Wandering, the Dorothy-esque protagonist receives a pair of cursed red shoes from a demon lover – but it is not only Oz she is evoking.

Her first, Apple and Knife (both translations are by Stephen J Epstein, with whom Paramaditha works closely), is a phantasmagorical collection of short stories and reimagined tales, not unlike Angela Carter and Carmen Maria Machado. The Wandering is Paramaditha’s second book to be translated into English. “So here the reader is in a way interpolated …” she begins one answer, before interrupting herself, “I hate that word!”

For the most part, she keeps her writing and academic selves separate she writes her novels in Indonesian, her academic work in English. On finishing her BA in Indonesia, she won a Fulbright scholarship to California before completing her PhD at NYU and moving to Australia several years later. “I thought America only existed on TV!” If travel eluded her as a child, it has shaped her reality as an adult. “I grew up in the 90s in Jakarta as a third-world teenager, and for me, travel was unattainable,” she says. Paramaditha’s current location is Sydney, where she lives with her partner and daughter and lectures on media and film studies at Macquarie University. We’re walking on a map that already exists and our location on the map has been decided.” In order to fit into certain ideals, you need to mutilate yourself “Travelling is always about making choices, but at the same time your choices are made for you, structured by many things: nationality, class, gender, what we can access and what not. “We are always haunted by the question of not choosing the other path, the road not taken,” Paramaditha says.

The Wandering is a novel more interested in the offcuts, in what – and who – get left behind in stories of travel.

Apple and knife intan paramaditha