Writer, editor, activist, and poet, for more than 30 years, Goenawan Mohamad is the founder and editor of Tempo Magazine, Indonesia's most widely circulated weekly. His magazine was officially banned in 1994, but reopened in October, following the ouster of Indonesian President Suharto. He has won a Harvard University Nieman Fellowship for journalism and the Press Freedom Award of the Committee to Protect Journalists. In 1999 he was nominated by World Press Review as international editor of the year.

Goenawan is also a poet who related poetry to political life. He once said that poetry, by providing a sane, private space of integrity, resists totalitarian power