The Pontas Agency is delighted to announce that The Dog Meows, The Cat Barks, the newest work by internationally-acclaimed Indonesian author Eka Kurniawan will be published in English by New Directions in the US, by Pushkin Press in the UK, by Speaking Tiger in India, and by Monsoon Books in South East Asia. The translation will be done by Annie Tucker, who has been translating the author’s work into English for years. French and German rights have also been sold to Sabine Wespieser and Unionsverlag, respectively, and all other translation and audiovisual rights are available. Check option publishers here.
New Directions and Pushkin Press published the author’s first novel to be translated into English, Beauty is a Wound, which was a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize 2016 and they continued to champion the author with Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash in 2017. The Dog Meows, The Cat Barks will be the next work they publish by Eka Kurniawan, currently slated for an April or May 2026 publication. Gramedia published the book in its original Bahasa Indonesia in July 2024 and the author has been touring Indonesia to promote the book (in the picture below, an event at Makassar City).
The novella depicts life in an Indonesian village through a compulsively readable first-person voice, which is highly relatable–at least at first. It follows Sato Reang, who enjoys an idyllic childhood of cricket fighting, soccer, and mischief in his small Javanese town–until the day he is circumcised and his observant father forces him into a life of Islamic piety. For years, Sato outwardly obeys his father and even tries to understand him. But all the while the boy chafes at the strictures of his religious routine, longing for everyday pleasures and the freedom to develop his own identity.
Mysterious portents build, as dreams and the tales of fellow villagers seem to offer Sato hazy clues to some form of release. After a series of humiliations at his father’s hand, including being forced into friendship with Jamal, an earnestly pious boy he despises, Sato starts to scheme. His first victory: finding clandestine catharsis in setting the town movie theater on fire.
But it’s not enough. Even after his father dies suddenly, Sato can’t escape. By the time Sato Reang realizes he has the agency to liberate himself from his father’s rules and worldview, the intuitive joy he once took in his existence has curdled.
Through his unsettling psychological portrait of a damaged teen, Eka Kurniawan tests the links between religiosity and violence, and offers a disturbing meditation on piety and sacrilege, force and freedom.
More about the author
Eka Kurniawan was born in Tasikmalaya, Indonesia, in 1975. He studied philosophy at Gadjah Mada University, Yogyakarta, and is the author of novels, short stories, essays, movie scripts, and graphic novels. He was longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2016, and his work has been translated into thirty-five languages. His epic novel of magical realism, Beauty is a Wound, has been widely praised internationally. The New York Review of Books considers Kurniawan “a literary child of Günter Grass, Gabriel García Márquez, and Salman Rushdie,” and Le Monde has suggested that in the future, Nobel jurors may award him the prize “that Indonesia has never received.”
For more information about the above work, please contact Anna Soler-Pont (anna@pontas-agency.com).