Cafe Ombak, Makassar, Friday night, May 15, 2026. Day two of the Makassar International Writers Festival (MIWF) 2026 had just wrapped up at Fort Rotterdam, and some of the writers, publishers, diplomats, and cultural practitioners moved on to a more relaxed setting. The evening was designed as a space for exchanging ideas — a place where people who had long worked at two different ends of the literary world, Indonesia and France, could get to know one another before talking about collaboration.
The event goes by two names. The festival schedule and the Cultural Preservation Office (Balai Pelestarian Kebudayaan/BPK) Region XIX South Sulawesi call it MIWF Networking Night; the Ministry of Culture’s press release calls it the Indonesia–France Connection Night. Both point to the same evening: a gathering hosted by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Indonesia together with the Embassy of France in Indonesia, slotted into MIWF 2026, which ran May 14–17 at Fort Rotterdam and Makassar Creative Hub.
This year’s festival theme, “Re-co-ordinate”, felt apt. Amid 144 programs, 257 panelists, and participants from seven countries, Networking Night took on one specific job: bringing people together.
From Paris to Makassar: The Trail of an Agreement
The evening at Cafe Ombak didn’t come out of nowhere. About three weeks earlier, on April 22, 2026, Indonesian Minister of Culture Fadli Zon met French Minister of Culture Catherine Pégard in Paris. That meeting produced a string of agreements: strengthening the Choix Goncourt Indonésie and Read Indonesia programs, working with the Centre national du livre (CNL) on writer residencies and joint literary festivals, and signing an agreement between the École du Louvre and the Indonesian Heritage Agency, along with developing the Borobudur and Prambanan areas.
Fadli Zon stressed that cultural cooperation between Indonesia and France must keep growing in ways that are concrete, reciprocal, and long-term in their impact. The two countries’ collaboration at MIWF 2026 was itself described as an implementation of the Borobudur Declaration, the joint cultural strategy agreed upon by President Prabowo Subianto and President Emmanuel Macron in May 2025.
Connection Night in Makassar was the direct follow-up to that Paris meeting — an agreement struck at the ministerial level, handed down to the tables where practitioners sit.
Who Shared the Table That Night
The guest list reflected just how wide this collaboration reaches. On the Indonesian side were Anissa Rengganis, Special Staff to the Minister of Culture for Cultural Diplomacy and International Relations, and Mayor of Makassar Munafri Arifuddin — MIWF 2026 marks the festival’s first collaboration with the Makassar city government since 2013. Filmmaker Riri Riza, a co-founder of Rumata’ ArtSpace, the space from which MIWF was born, was there too.
From France came Ambassador Fabien Penone, Académie Goncourt President Philippe Claudel, Institut Français Indonésie Director Jules Irrmann, and Éditions Gallimard Secretary General Karina Hocine. Gallimard has been in Paris since 1911 and has published 38 winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Anissa Rengganis called Connection Night more than a meeting — a starting point for real collaborations to come. The aims are clear: cultural exchange, book translation, writer residencies, and partnerships between festivals.
Three Literary Programs “Married” Together
What made the evening more than a social occasion was the concrete agenda brought to the table. Anissa used the word “marry” to describe the synergy between three literary programs from the two countries: France’s Choix Goncourt Indonésie — in which Indonesian university students choose their favorite author from among the Prix Goncourt nominees — together with Indonesia’s Read Indonesia and National Talent Management (Manajemen Talenta Nasional/MTN) for Literature.
Looking ahead, three strategic agenda items have been agreed upon:
- Indonesia’s participation in Le Festival du Livre de Paris 2027
- France’s involvement in the Indonesia International Book Fair (IIBF) 2026–2027
- Development of a translation subsidy scheme for French and international publishers
It is that last point that opens the most tangible road for Indonesian literature into the world book market — so that works written in Indonesian can reach the shelves of a Paris bookstore without having to wait for luck.
Networking Night itself was part of the special program “MIWF Meets France”, supported by the Ministry of Culture’s Literature Promotion Team and MTN for Literature. The series opened with a speech by the French Ambassador on May 14, followed by the discussion “Surrealism and Magic in Literature”, a “Meet The Publisher” session with Marjin Kiri, KPG, GPU, Sokong, and BaNANA, and the ecology panel “Living in Peril”, then Networking Night at Cafe Ombak on Friday night, before closing with the delegation’s visit to Leang-Leang Archaeological Park the next day.
A Festival Driven by Its People
MIWF was born in 2011 out of Rumata’ ArtSpace, the cultural space that Lily Yulianti Farid founded with Riri Riza a year earlier. Its first edition ran five days with 25 writers and poets, eight of them guests from abroad. Fifteen years on, the festival — which calls itself the first and only international writers festival in eastern Indonesia — has received the International Excellence Award from the London Book Fair (2020), has run as a zero-waste festival since 2019, and has refused to stage all-male panels since 2020.
MIWF Director Aan Mansyur says the festival has survived this long because it is driven by citizens and communities. That sentence explains why Networking Night felt significant: an agreement between two countries was brought to a festival that grew from the ground up, not announced from a ministry building in the capital.
One night in Makassar won’t, of course, redraw the map of world literature on its own. But the road to Paris 2027 now has a clear starting point, and the people who will walk it already know one another by face.
Jmotion Projects was entrusted with production support for MIWF Networking Night at Cafe Ombak, Makassar, as part of the MIWF 2026 program.
Organizers: Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Indonesia & Embassy of France in Indonesia, as part of the Makassar International Writers Festival 2026 | Event production support: Jmotion Projects
