Chairil Anwar

Chairil Anwar was born on 26 July 1922 in Medan, in northern Sumatra. He left school at eighteen and followed his mother to Batavia in 1940, after his parents' divorce. He read English, Dutch and German, translated Gide, and his verse bears the mark of Marsman, Rilke and Slauerhoff. Revealed in 1942, often turned down by magazines under Japanese rule, which found his poems too individualistic, he wrote some seventy poems in seven years, most of which were still unpublished at his death. He died in Jakarta on 28 April 1949, aged twenty-six.

In the catalogue 1

• PoetryThe Voice of the NightDeru Campur DebuChairil Anwar · 1949Literature