Saadah Alim

Saadah Alim (1897–1968) was a writer, playwright, translator, journalist and educator in the Dutch East Indies and in Indonesia after independence. She was one of only a handful of Indonesian women authors to be published during the colonial period, alongside Fatimah Hasan Delais, Sariamin Ismail, Soewarsih Djojopoespito and a few others. She is known primarily for her journalism, her collection of short stories, and her comedic play (1940).

Biography Early life Saadah was born into a Minangkabau family in Padang, Sumatra's Westkust Residency, Dutch East Indies on June 9, 1897. She studied in a (a colonial preparatory school for schoolteachers) in Bukittinggi and she may have studied in a teacher's school in Bandung, Java for a time as well.

Career Saadah became a primary schoolteacher in a Dutch language school in Padang in 1918. Among its themes were the spread of modern ideas, the conditions of women, and opposition to some practices such as Polygamy. However, she mainly managed to recruit young male writers such as Mohammad Hatta, Bahder Djohan, Mohammad Yamin and Adi Negoro. Even Mahyuddin Datuk Sutan Maharadja, a pioneering Malay language journalist who himself published a newspaper aimed at women (Soenting Melajoe) was a vocal critic of . However, by 1921 the school was facing difficulties in attracting and retaining students. was aimed at women readers and Alim's articles touched on matters of education and running a family. ) It remained for several decades a rare example of a published play written by an Indonesian woman. She followed it with (Indonesian: The garden of diversions), a short story collection of sentimental and optimistic love stories, in 1941. She printed short stories in Pandji Poestaka, the literary magazine of Balai Pustaka. She also translated a number of foreign-language works into Indonesian during the 1930s and 1940s, including Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain and East Wind: West Wind by Pearl S. Buck, as well as some lesser-known authors who are unknown today, like G. A. Leembruggen.

In 1951 she sued the Indonesian film company for releasing a film , which was parly based on her play , without paying her for the rights. The company had apparently bought rights to it from a third party who did not have any authority to sell it on her behalf, under a different title , and the matter was complicated by the fact that the film production occurred during the period where the Netherlands was withdrawing from Indonesia.

She died on August 18, 1968, in Jakarta. (Balai Pustaka, 1941, short story collection)

Translations (translation of a Dutch-language work by F. A. Volkers-Schippers, 1939) (Pearl S. Buck, 1941) (Frederick Marryat, 1949) (date unknown, translation of Dutch-language work by Diet Kramer) (Riesco) The Lontar anthology of Indonesian drama (Lontar Foundation, 2010)