Sergius Seeks Bacchus

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.

Tiffany Tsao is a translator and novelist. Her translations of Indonesian literary work have been awarded the PEN Translation Prize and NSW Premier's Translation Prize. Her novel The Majesties was longlisted for the Ned Kelly Award. She has a Ph.D. in English from UC Berkeley.