‘Speaking to the world’: author and cultural figure

During his decade of detention from 1956 to 1966, Mochtar Lubis may have been isolated, but he was far from idle. While Indonesia Raya was still able to publish, he continued determinedly at its helm, but in its absence he simply redirected his prodigious energies more consciously into his various other interests, most prominently fiction writing. In this, he was merely maintaining habits which had developed side by side with his work as a journalist since the 1940s.