Sergius Seeks Bacchus

Sergius Seeks Bacchus is a heartbreaking and humorous rumination on what it means to be in the minority in terms of sexuality, ethnicity, and religion. Drawing on the poet's life as an openly gay writer of Bataknese descent and Christian background, the collection furnishes readers with an alternative gospel, a book of bittersweet and tragicomic good news pieced together from encounters with ridicule, persecution, loneliness, and also happiness.
The thirty-three poems in Norman Pasaribu's prize-winning debut display a thrilling diversity of style, length, and tone, and telescope out from individual experience to that of fellow members of the queer community, finding inspiration equally in the work of great Indonesian poets and the international literary canon, from Dante to Herta Müller.

Norman Erikson Pasaribu is a Toba Batak poet and translator. Their first poetry collection Sergius Mencari Bacchus won the first prize on the 2015 Jakarta Arts Council Poetry Manuscript Competition. Its English translation by Tiffany Tsao won a PEN Translates award and was published in the UK with Tilted Axis Press. Their collection of short stories Happy Stories, Mostly (tr. Tiffany Tsao) won the 2022 Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses and was listed for the 2022 International Booker Prize, the 2023 National Translation Award for Prose, the 2023 Cercador Prize for Literature in Translation. Among their accolades are the inaugural Patricia Kailis International Writing Fellowship and Southeast Asia Literary Council’s Sastrawan Muda. They are Harvard University Asia Center’s 2023-2024 Artist in Residence.