Pramoedya Ananta Toer

Pramoedya fought in Indonesia's revolution against the returning Dutch, was imprisoned by them for two years, and began a writing career soon after independence that made him the country's most prominent novelist and, later, its most persecuted. The 1965 anti-communist purges swept him into custody without trial or charge, and he spent fourteen years imprisoned, most of it on the penal island of Buru.

Denied pen and paper for years, he composed the Buru Quartet's four novels orally, reciting them to fellow prisoners before finally being allowed to write them down. This Earth of Mankind, the first volume, follows Minke, a brilliant young Javanese student, awakening to Dutch colonial racism through his love for a plantation concubine's clever, defiant daughter; Child of All Nations continues his political education.

Released in 1979 but kept under city arrest for years after and banned in Indonesia until Suharto's fall, Pramoedya was repeatedly floated for the Nobel Prize before his death in Jakarta in 2006.