Harry Aveling

Who is Harry Aveling?

Harry Aveling is an Australian scholar, translator and teacher. He specializes in Indonesian and Malaysian literature, and Translation Studies. He received the degrees of Doctor of Philosophy in Malay Studies from the National University of Singapore and Doctor of Creative Arts from the University of Technology, Sydney. Besides his academic studies, he has translated extensively from Indonesian and Malay, from Vietnamese Francophone writing, and also co-translated from Hindi. He has also been awarded an Anugerah Pengembangan Sastra for his translation work. Aveling has two sons, a daughter and three granddaughters.

In the early 1960s Aveling began studying Indonesian and Malay. He later lived in Malaysia for three years of "total immersion" during the 1970s; he later described it as a time when the Malaysian government was in desperate need for foreign professors to teach in their newly revitalised education system; Malay teachers during the period were earning doctorates abroad. By this time he had already translated several volumes.

Aveling has held the rank of Adjunct Professor of Southeast Asian Literature at Ohio University since 2002; that year, he wrote a study of Indonesian poetry during the New Order under President Suharto, which outlined the development of the medium in its socio-historical context. Writing for The Jakarta Post, Lie Hua noted that it was perhaps the first such study but that it had several mistranslations. By this time he had translated more than 50 volumes of Indonesian and Malay literature. In 2006 he served as Visiting Professor of Translation Studies at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Indonesia.