Toer, Pramoedya Ananta

Pramoedya Ananta Toer is Indonesia's best-known author outside Indonesia. He has been nominated for the Nobel Prize and he has been compared to literary giants such as Dostoyevsky and Dickens. Toer was born as the oldest of nine children in a family that was involved in the independence movement at Blora, Java, in what was then the Dutch East Indies. His father, who was headmaster of his school, was not happy with his son's performance, and when Toer was fourteen he was transferred to the Radio Vocational School in Surabaya.