A. W. Prihandita
2024 Awards Eligibility
⭐️ 2024 Clarkesworld Readers' Poll Winner, Best Novelette
A human "doctor" must treat a very rare alien species using only Al assistance and translation machines. But the corporatization of medical technology and a history of genocide means nothing is as it seems.Audio version on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Here's a thread where I talked a little about my thoughts behind the story. And here's another thread. This story means a lot to me and contains many things I've spent hours thinking about, in bed when the state of the world keeps me up at night, in my dissertation as I grapple with what "knowing" even means, and for weeks at Clarion workshop as I wrote and sobbed on my dorm room trying to make it all come together. If you can only read one thing from me, please read this one!
A book-mender starts seeing shadows in the books she mends, shadows that are traces of a forbidden magic that reveal the dark history of both the empire and her own family.Audio version on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
A vengeful ghost and her half-human daughter promised to be good for a second chance to live, but both life and the nature of their own flesh creep too close to violence.If you'd like a free copy of this story for award reading, please email me.
After his ship drowned in a storm, a sailor is stranded on the great sea wall off the coast of the sunken city Jakarta.
With graduation fast approaching, Bandhu must find his magical Intuition to know what kind of jobs he'll be good for. But his search of his magical power brings him to a piece of family history—and political history—that had forced his parents and grandparents to drift apart.
2023 Releases
About Me
Hi, I'm Anselma Widha Prihandita, an Indonesian woman writer of speculative fiction. I love fiction that peers into the dark corners of the human heart, both to trace the threads that shape oppression and to find a ray of hope amidst it.I attended the Odyssey workshop in 2023 on their Fresh Voices Scholarship, and the Clarion workshop in 2024 on their Octavia Butler Scholarship. You can find my published short fiction linked here, and as for novels, I'm currently working on an ecohorror/urban fantasy set in Jakarta.When I'm not worldbuilding, I teach college writing and work on my PhD dissertation on decolonial and transnational composition. I typically reside on the US West Coast during the nine-month academic year, then spend my summers in Indonesia, where the entirety of my family remain. My life-long dream is to write fiction full time with a cat on my lap.I'm represented by Thais Afonso of Azantian Literary Agency.