Laksmi Pamuntjak has since 1994 written columns and articles on politics, film, food, classical music and literature for Tempo Magazine and elsewhere. She translated and edited Goenawan Mohamad: Selected Poems, published Jakarta Good Food Guide—an annually updated new take on food writing—and co-founded Aksara, a bilingual bookstore in Jakarta. 

Her first collection of poetry, Ellipsis, appeared on The Herald UK 2005 Books of the Year list, making her the first, as The Jakarta Post wrote, “…(Indonesian) whose book has been mentioned as an international book of the year.”

A treatise on violence and the Iliad entitled Perang, Langit dan Dua Perempuan (War, Heaven, and Two Women) came out in 2006, along with her first collection of short stories, The Diary of R.S.: Musings on Art, which is being translated into French and Indonesian.

The Anagram, her second poetry collection, was released in March 2007.

In September of the same year, she released her translation of Goenawan Mohamad’s book of aphorisms under the title On God and Other Unfinished Things.

Laksmi has been invited to literary readings and discussions in Amsterdam, Paris, New York and LA and international literary festivals in Australia (Byron Bay Literary Festival, National Poetry Festival in Victoria), Canada (Wordfest Literary Festival in Calgary and Banff), Hong Kong, Singapore, Ubud, Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur.

Laksmi is currently working on The Blue Widow, a novel set in Buru Island, the site of a large tropical gulag during the Suharto administration (1965-1998), where alleged communists and Communist Party sympathizers were detained for more than a decade without being formally charged or tried in court. Her latest poetry collection, The Anagram, has eight poems and prose poems inspired by the Buru experience, entitled “From the Buru Notebook.”

The third edition of the award-winning Jakarta Good Food Guide (2008-2009) comes out in March 2008.