Djokolelono is the pen-name of an Indonesian writer and translator who is legendary in his region. At seventy-eight, he has written close to fifty books for young children, middle-graders, young-adults and adults. His debut novels, Getaran (“Vibration”) and Fall to the Sun (1976), were the earliest science fiction written by an Indonesian, and today are hailed as “far beyond the era in which the novel was written.”
While none of his books are commercially available in English at this time, he allowed YAdudebooks to read a not-yet-released English translation of The Moon Son (2011), a time-travel fantasy and history adventure, prior to this interview.
More information can be found at:
Goodreads.com  and Djokollono – Indonesian Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (id-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog)
Book Author Djokolelono – Gramedia Digital

Q: As a celebrated children’s and young adult author, tell us what inspired you to take up writing for kids.
A: A little bit coincidence, a little bit vengeance. As a child, I read many children’s books, and I remember thinking I could write, or at least tell, stories better. Amongst these books were works by Karl May, James Fenimore Cooper and of course Mark Twain. I was barely ten years old – much too young for an Indonesian child to read those kinds of books.
So, adventure stories were injected into my blood – which reflected in my later works: adventure, adventure, adventure. I really wanted to take revenge on those not-so-sophisticated adventure word-smith guys.
When I started to write commercially, I was promptly adopted by a big magazine for children – “big” meaning they paid more than the adult magazines of that era, the Sixties. I’d already written adult stories at the time, so I welcomed their patronage.
About that time the Jakarta Government created a publishing house, manned entirely by writers and artists – and of course they knew my name from the magazine. They asked me to write for them and I did – excitedly, because until then, I’d never imagined my children’s writing would become books!
I really wrote like crazy. I remember I could produce a manuscript once a week – not a thick one, but a book of sixty to seventy pages – never knowing whether the firm was going to produce it or not. (They did produce most of them).
When interviewed, one of their directors (a foremost writer in Indonesia, Mr. Ajip Rosidi) was asked why his publishing house published so many books by Djokolelono, and his laconic answer was, “What can we do? He sends us manuscripts week after week, regardless how many we turn down!”
Adventure become the color of my works, but the building blocks of those were very, very local wisdoms – things I gathered from here and there during my childhood. For instance, I used local fairy tales, legends, songs and the like. In Getaran, I used a Sundanese children’s folk song to create the protagonist who fools an alien from another world.
I have written so many children’s books that I think I cannot think like an adult, and I love that.

Q: Your books are pioneers in sci-fi. Can you tell us what prompted you to go that route?
A: Actually, nothing prompted me so much as the hunger to write, and write again – and that means I had to write differently from the wild pack. In that era, children’s books were booming, and many styles were surfacing. (I have to say many of them were trying to follow my style, which was already flooding the market).
I was a student in the Bandung Technology Institute at the time (majoring in astronomy, no less!), and my diet was Flash Gordon comic strips. (My father read them to me as a child even before I could read). Living on the Bosscha Observatory grounds, I could use their laboratory freely – plus there was so much time in hand. So, everything added up – the situation (a quiet lonely place on top of a hill, with no neighbours or girlfriend), the timing (dark lonely nights when there were no stars to watch), the urge (be different and get more money!) – and the first sci-fi was born.
I thought (and still think) that writing not-so-high-brow adventure for children, attracts kids who are not too sophisticated, but can still take in the basic scientific knowledge. The adventure attracts them.

Q: Beyond the sci-fi and mystery elements, you sometimes include Indonesian history in your stories. Is your hope that this will educate kids while entertaining them, and perhaps give them a respect for Indonesia’s tumultuous past?
A: First of all, I have again to admit that I am very much a child at heart. My ultimate motive is to entertain other children – just as books entertained me in my childhood. But to make my stories more alive, I always use “local wisdoms,” including historical facts. These not only create a very interesting background, but yes, they are also eye-openers for readers – like the part that real children played in Indonesian independence struggles.
Sometimes parents of my readers say history lessons today are not giving the full picture to children. If my stories prompt children to ask, “Is it true?” then I am satisfied.

Q: Born just after World War II, you’ve seen a lot of significant events in your life. What experiences that have influenced your career?
A: None of my experiences have directly influenced my writing, except for providing background facts. But my parents separated after Indonesia’s independence, and later on, my father become a single parent to me. He was a soldier in the Dutch occupation army before, and afterward was with the Indonesian Armed Forces.
Disciplined as low-level Dutch soldier, he brought me up in almost unheard ways – providing me milk every morning, reading to me when I was very small, and even giving me boots when other kids were barefoot. This was the time I was introduced to Flash Gordon and Mandrake the Magician. And because those comic strips were originally in English with Indonesian translation, as soon as I could read, I worked at figuring out the meaning of the English words. It is those recollections that have shaped my career.

Q: Besides being perhaps the best-known children’s and young-adult author in Indonesia, you are also a prolific translator who has given non-English-speaking Indonesians the opportunity to read many works they would otherwise never have enjoyed: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain, the Choose Your Own Adventure series, the Mimin comic series, the Mallory Towers series, books by Enid Blyton and the Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairies series. Tell us about your work as a translator.
A: I also translated works by big literary names like Emile Zola, Gabrielle Garcia Marquez and John Steinbeck.
Those lighter adventures and fun stories, I felt drew me into my own world, and I translated them with much joy and high spirit. This resulted in translations that many readers really connected with, some even saying they were much better than the English version.
As for the heavier literary works, I also enjoyed them. I had to work much more carefully, learning and studying all the ways a literary work is “cooked.” This work forced me to read books I was sometimes I frightened to read – because they were so different from those that the childlike part of my brain enjoyed.
But in both categories, I enriched my thinking. From the children’s stories I learned about philosophical connections between the different characters, characterisations, children-parent situations, etc. From the heavier literary works, I learned to write better and think more deeply.

Q: What’s your latest work?
A: My latest one, published April 2022, is a Javanese alphabet picture.