Troppo

Indonesia, November, 2004: after the Bali and Denpasar bombings; just before the Boxing Day tsunami. Penny has escaped the confines of life in Perth and gone to East Java to reconnect with the Indo of her teenage years: to drift and drink and party. She’s flirting and surfing with the wild man Matt and she’s also taken a job at Shane’s Sumatran Oasis. The Aussie expat has a reputation as a troublemaker, and locals and bule (foreigners) alike are keen to get rid of him. Penny is pulled into a sinister world where xenophobia is on the rise and where two very different cultures will collide. A novel about how Australians see their relationship to Indonesia at a time when fundamentalism and terrorism is on the rise.

Madelaine Dickie has done all sorts of work to fuel a compulsion to write and an obsession with surfing. Madelaine’s writing has appeared in numerous publications including GriffithREVIEW (2013), the American journal Creative Nonfiction (2012) and Hecate (2010). In 2011, she received a Prime Minister’s Australia Asia Endeavour Award to move to West Java, Indonesia, and complete her first novel Troppo. In 2014, Troppo won the City of Fremantle T.A.G. Hungerford Award.