His works span the colonial period under Dutch rule, Indonesia's struggle for independence, its occupation by Japan during World War II, as well as the post-colonial authoritarian regimes of Sukarno and Suharto, and are infused with personal and national history.

He was the firstborn son in his family; his father was a teacher, who was also active in Boedi Oetomo (the first recognized indigenous national organization in Indonesia) and his mother was a rice trader.

[3] As it is written in his semi-autobiographical collection of short stories "Cerita Dari Blora", his name was originally Pramoedya Ananta Mastoer.

During World War II, Pramoedya (like many Indonesian Nationalists, Sukarno and Suharto among them) at first supported the occupying forces of Imperial Japan.

In this war, Pramoedya joined a paramilitary group in Karawang, Kranji (West Java), and eventually was stationed in Jakarta.

While imprisoned in Bukit Duri from 1947 to 1949 for his role in the Indonesian Revolution, he wrote his first major novels The Fugitive and Guerilla Family with financial support from the Opbouw-Pembangoenan Foundation, which also published the books.

In the years that followed, he took an interest in several other cultural exchanges, including trips to the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, as well as translations of Russian writers Maxim Gorky and Leo Tolstoy.

As he prepared the material, he began to realise that the study of the Indonesian language and literature had been distorted by the Dutch colonial authorities.

In an October 1965 coup, the army took power after alleging that the assassination of several senior generals was masterminded by the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI).

During the violent anti-Communist purge, he was arrested, beaten, and imprisoned by Suharto's government and named a tapol ("political prisoner").

His books were banned from circulation, and he was imprisoned without trial, first in Nusa Kambangan off the southern coast of Java, and then in the penal colony of Buru in the eastern islands of the Indonesian archipelago.

The main character of the series, Minke, a Javanese minor royal, was based in part on an Indonesian journalist active in the nationalist movement, Tirto Adhi Soerjo.

The quartet includes strong female characters of Indonesian and Chinese ethnicity and addresses the discrimination and indignities of living under colonial rule and the struggle for personal and national political independence.

During this time he released The Girl From the Coast, another semi-fictional novel based on his grandmother's own experience (volumes 2 and 3 of this work were destroyed along with his library in 1965).

Pramoedya earned several accolades and was frequently discussed as Indonesia's and Southeast Asia's best candidate for a Nobel Prize in Literature.

[5] Pramoedya also shares a personal history of hardship and detention for his efforts of self-expression and the political aspects of his writings and struggles against the censorship of his work by the leaders of his people.