ISBN: 9781911284239
Author: Norman Erikson Pasaribu

Translated from Indonesian by Tiffany Tsao

Publisher Information: Tilted Axis Press

Publication Date: 2019/03/21

Topical Subject Header: Fiction

Sergius Seeks Bacchus

C$20.00

Shortlisted, NSW Premier’s Translation Prize 2021

Winner, English PEN Translates Award

Sergius Seeks Bacchus is a heartbreaking and humorous rumination on what it means to be in the minority in terms of sexuality, ethnicity, and religion. Drawing on the poet’s life as an openly gay writer of Bataknese descent and Christian background, the collection furnishes readers with an alternative gospel, a book of bittersweet and tragicomic good news pieced together from encounters with ridicule, persecution, loneliness, and also happiness.

The thirty-three poems in Norman Pasaribu’s prize-winning debut display a thrilling diversity of style, length, and tone, and telescope out from individual experience to that of fellow members of the queer community, finding inspiration equally in the work of great Indonesian poets and the international literary canon, from Dante to Herta Müller.
Norman Erikson Pasaribu is a Toba Batak poet and writer. Their first poetry collection, Sergius Mencari Bacchus, won the first prize in the 2015 Jakarta Arts Council Poetry Manuscript Competition, and led them to win the 2017 Sastrawan Muda from the Southeast Asia Literary Council (Mastera). Their book of fiction, Happy Stories, Mostly (tr. Tiffany Tsao), gained international critical acclaim. It won the 2022 Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses, and was listed for the 2022 International Booker Prize, the 2023 National Book Critics Circle's Barrios Book in Translation, the 2023 National Translation Award for Prose and the 2023 Cercador Prize for Literature in Translation. Norman was the inaugural recipient of the Patricia Kailis International Writing Fellowship, and was a Harvard University Asia Center's artist in residence for 2023–2024. They are a sixteenth-generation descendant of Siraja Bondar of the indigenous Toba Batak, North Sumatra.