A.C. Maas is the name I write under. Behind it is an Indonesian writer who has spent most of his adult life inside languages — eleven of them, by the honest count.
Indonesian first, my mother tongue and my home. English came young, and well — because that is what an Indonesian boy with curiosity did with his afternoons. The rest arrived in their times: Italian, French, Spanish, Japanese, German, Dutch, Arabic, Norwegian, Portuguese. Each one brought a different version of the world, and a different version of me.
There is a longer story behind each of the languages — the cassette my father kept, the Arabic I learned at five, the Italian prompted by a World Cup, the Spanish that has stayed at the centre of the work. Those stories live in the essays and in the books that I am working on.
I write about languages because languages have been the medium in which my life has actually happened. The friendships that mattered, the marriage, the work, the grief, the music, the prayers — all of them passed through one language or another, and sometimes through several at once. To write about languages is, for me, to write about everything else.
This site sits alongside two others, each devoted to a particular language. latinamericanspanish.com is the home for everything I write about Spanish — the one I keep returning to. learnspokenarabic.com is the other companion, devoted to Arabic that has been a quiet thread through my life since I was five years old. This site, acmaas.com, is the broader site, where the full body of work lives, where the personal essays accumulate, and where my books will be announced as they come.
If you have arrived through an essay or a recommendation and want to follow the work as it grows, the Newsletter is the simplest way. I send it when I have something worth sending — sometimes twice in a fortnight, sometimes months between letters — and I will not flood your inbox.
Thank you for reading.