#including one of his doctor very publicly in my art class when i was 16

[wrrosette]

7 Contemporary Philippine Literature Writers to Look Out For

Edited and abridged by Karmella Tapia

In the spirit of celebrating the power of language and our beloved nation’s cultural identity, our grade 12 students recently submitted BioNotes describing the Contemporary Philippine Literature writer of their choice (as part of their requirements for 21st Century Literature class). Here are but seven of the many talented authors highly recommended by some of Rosette’s contributors for your perusal. From experienced writers long in the business, to breakout ones fresh on the scene, our list explores a wide-range of Filipino men and women who brought their ideas and experiences to life.

1. Katrina Therese F. Olan

Submitted by Jean Denise Duran

Background of the Author

Born on May 28, 1996, Katrina Therese F. Olan is an award-winning Filipino filmmaker and contemporary writer.  She was very creative, open-minded, and strong-willed as a child. At the age of seven, she started writing chapter books. By the time she reached the age of twelve, she won a Cinemalaya award. One of her astounding traits is her ability to use her great imagination to create art. She has the gift of giving colour and light to the most monotonous things and being able to get others interested in it. Her love for storytelling prompted her desire to publish. Thus, she began her pursuit of creating a great story which took over a decade to create. She is now a full-time copywriter. Though she is full of wisdom and experience, she has an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. Olan has yet so much to learn about the world and herself. With all this passion, knowledge, and grit, she hopes to become a great writer that will touch the hearts of her countrymen.

Overview of Literary Works

Katrina Therese F. Olan has only published one book entitled Skies Above. The sci-fi fantasy novel touches on the themes of courage, truth, and humanity. She has yet to write more books. Olan said that she has done a lot of worldbuilding in fantasy. However, she has yet still to touch on local Filipino literature and themes. She has not completed a piece on the Philippines but is working on a Filipino sci-fi novel called Tablay that will hopefully be in materialization soon. 

2. Rica Bolipata-Santos

Submitted by Karmella Tapia

Background of the Writer

Raised in a large, arts-inclined, and sometimes financially-struggling family, Rica Bolipata-Santos discovered a love for books, words, and teaching as early as 4 years old. True to her passions, she ended up graduating from Ateneo de Manila, first with a Bachelor’s degree in Humanities, and later a Master’s degree in English Literature. After a brief stint teaching at St. Paul’s Pasig, she joined Ateneo’s English Department in 1994 and has been teaching Creative Writing and English Literature at her alma mater ever since. Though she is credited as Ateneo’s University Communication and Public Relations Director, Assistant Professor, Alumni Magazine Editor-in-Chief, and Library of Women’s Writings Director at present, Rica is most known for her detailed, reflective, and expressive essays drawn straight from her experiences as a wife, daughter, mother of three, and Filipina. With regards to her writing career, Rica became publicly recognized for her first collection of essays, Love, Desire, Children, Etc. released in 2005, which received the Madrigal-Gonzales First Book Award. She has since published more books of a similar nature, become a columnist in The Philippine Star and Female Network, and conducted creative writing workshops to hopefully inspire the next generation of Filipino writers.

Overview of Works

The writings of Rica all are short and auto-biographical in nature. To be specific, her published books include Love, Desire, Children, Etc. (2005), Lost and Found and Other Essays (2011), and Navel (2017). Looking at online works, some of her brief column pieces featured in The Philippine Star and Female Network are Beautiful habits (2012), Falling (2013), A valedictory address (2014), and more recent works like Beginnings and endings (2018) or Graduation thoughts (2018). All her essays use conversational, memoir-like prose to bring forward abstract and familiar themes like womanhood, the passage of time, love, childhood, family, and everyday human suffering through her own reflection on the topics. It should also be noted that it is characteristic of her works to pinpoint exact moments of time, viewed through the lenses of her different roles. As she wrote in one article for The Philippine Star, “I am aware of my vanity, clued in by the fact that I remember so much physical detail from a moment that occurred 35 years ago.”

3. Samantha Sotto-Yambao

Submitted by Alexia Dagondon

Background of the Author

Little is known about her early life but it was at age 16 that Samantha Sotto-Yambao first set foot in Europe due to her father’s expatriation by his company. That magic moment would later serve as the backdrop of her novels. When her family returned to the Philippines, Sam enrolled in Ateneo de Manila University as a Communications major and became the editor of The Guidon, the university’s student-run publication. After graduation, she followed in her father’s footsteps and worked in the marketing department of a multinational company. This job required her to travel often and after awhile, she quit in order to be a full-time mom. It was with this extra time that she used to begin writing. Before Ever After, her first novel was a product of watching Doctor Who and the backpacking trip she took to Europe in her early 20’s. She finished writing the book in one school year, an impressive feat for someone with no formal training in writing.

Overview of Literary Works

Sotto joins the modest line-up of internationally-published Filipino authors with her two novels, both published by a division of Random House New York. Before Ever After tells the story of a widow, Shelley Gallus, who after three years still mourns for the loss of her husband, Max. Love and Gravity is Sotto’s second and most recent published novel, detailing the tale of a young Isaac Newton defies the laws of physics in order to connect with his love, a music prodigy living in modern-day San Francisco. It is Sotto’s affinity with time as well as her rich knowledge of Europe that makes both of her published novels remarkable. One sees Sotto’s use of words is masterful, in the way she paints vivid scenes of Europe, the tastes, smells and colors melding together to create one symphony. Her characters are not just fiction but emotions so intricately layered that you take delight in seeing them slowly expose their inner self. Her style is distinctly Filipino, a different flavor from other romance novels, as noted by her foreign critics and reviewers.

4. Paul Arvisu Dumol

Submitted by Annika Ramento  

Background of the Author

Paul Arvisu Dumol is a man of many titles. He is considered a playwright, a historian, an educator and a writer. Today, he is a member of the Philippine Center for Civic Education and Democracy, as well as, a member of the board of trustees in the University of Asia and the Pacific. Before he became the renowned academician he is today, it should also be recognized that he graduated as Valedictorian and summa cum laude in the Ateneo de Manila. He continued his studies to attain his master’s degree at the University of Navarra, and, from the Pontifical Institute for Medieval Studies, he attained his licentiate in Medieval Studies with specialization in Philosophy. Finally, he gained his doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Toronto. Due to his multiple writings, he has received many awards including the Pambansang Alagad ni Balagtas in the field of drama from the Unyon ng Manunulat ng Pilipinas, Centennial Honors for the Arts in the field of drama from the Cultural Center of the Philippines (1999) and an award for best translation of The Handbook for Confessors of the Synod of Manila of 1582.  

Overview of Literary Works 

Dumol created the classic Ang Paglilitis ni Mang Serapio, considered by many to be the first Philippine modernist play and the most frequently performed one-act play in Filipino. This play centers on an underprivileged man named Mang Serapio who was unjustly accused of an irrational crime, with no means to defend himself. After writing this, he wrote many other plays entitled Kabesang Tales in 1974, Felipe de las Casas in 1983, Libretto of Ang Pagpapatay kay Luna in 2002 to name a few. He insists to use Filipino as the medium of language in all his plays. While he is more known for writing in this literary form, he also has written multiple books, such as A History of the Filipino People for High Schools, Beyond the "Trapo" Society: Saint Josemaría Escrivá's Concept of Citizenship and The Metaphysics of Reading Underlying Dante's Commedia: The Ingegno. It is clear that when Dumol writes, it is because he wants to shed light to a certain issue or topic in the Philippines. He also uses multiple historical figures when writing, such as Kabesang Tales from the Philippine classic, Noli me Tangere and Antonio Luna, an army general during the Philippine-American War.

5. Barbara Jane Reyes

Submitted by Maria Katrina Rocha

Background of the Author

Barbara Jane Reyes is a Filipino author born in 1971 in Manila, Philippines but was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. She studied Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley and received her MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. As well as being a poet and author, Reyes was a professor at Mill’s College for a graduate poetry workshop, San Francisco State University for Filipino American Literature, and University of San Francisco’s Philippine Studies Program. She currently serves on the board of Philippine American Writers and Artists (PAWA) and is co-editor of Doveglion Press, an “independent publisher of political literature and orature”. Some of her works include Diwata (BOA Editions, 2010), Gravities of Center (Arkipelago Books, 2003), Poeta en San Francisco (Tinfish Press, 2005), Easter Sunday (Ypolita Press, 2008), and Cherry (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2008). Reyes was the winner of the Global Filipino Literary Award for Poetry and James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets and was a finalist for the California Book Award.  

Overview of Literary Works

Barbara Jane Reyes’ writings try to reach towards young Filipina women because she feels that she needs to honor how Filipina-Americans do and do not fit in with the Asian-American communities and the Latino communities due to the complicated history with the Americans in the Philippines as well as being Asian with Spanish names and traditions. She has five full-length poetry collections, three chapbooks, and a few poems online. In an interview with Rebecca Sutton, Sutton talks about Reyes being able to incorporate “multiple languages, multiple cultures, and multiple meanings” into her work. Reyes responded that it was due to being surrounded by people who spoke different languages such as Tagalog, Ilocano, and English and who spoke what language. She states, “I've always thought about where these words come from, what do they sound like, who uses them and for what purpose, to speak to whom or to speak about whom”. This can be seen in one of her works entitled Diwata, which is a “hybrid of Filipina and Western storytelling” that includes the bilinguality of embroiling Tagalog and English.

6. Dean Francis Alfar

Submitted by Therese Ravalo

Background of the Author

Born on January 2, 1969, Dean Francis Alfar grew up surrounded by books. As a child, his mother introduced him to fairy tales, reading them to him as bedtime stories. In a 2017 interview, he said, These stories inspired my imagination. When I ran out of books, I promised myself that one day, I’d tell my own stories.  Indeed, Alfar went on to tell his own stories. In his early days, he established himself as a playwright, writing plays that garnered various accolades. A ten-time Palanca Awardee for Literature, he authored many short stories, some of which were compiled and published in one book. In addition, Alfar won in the 2006 Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature, specifically the Grand Prize for Novel with his entry, Salamanca. Additionally, Alfar has edited anthologies of speculative fiction, which is also known as spec fic for short. Since 2005, he has been collating works of fellow speculative fiction writers in the Philippine Speculative Fiction (PSF) series. Recently, though, he chose to step down as editor, since he felt that it is vital to get other editorial perspectives.

Overview of Literary Works

Through the years, Alfar developed his illustrious writing career, primarily delving into speculative fiction. While he is known for his short stories such as How Rosang Taba Won a Race and Saturdays with Fray Villalobos, as well as the PSF anthologies he spearheaded, two of his more notable works are Salamanca and The Kite of Stars and Other Stories. His first novel, Salamanca, is a story of two lovers intertwined with elements of fantasy and it includes a myriad of characters as well. On the other hand, The Kite of Stars is originally a play that bagged the second prize in the One-act Play category. A tale about unrequited love and reaching for the stars, it has since been transformed into prose form and is part of a collection of short stories.

7. Lualhati Bautista

Submitted by Natalie Roque

Background of the Author

Lualhati Bautista was born on December 2, 1945, in Tondo, Manila. From early on she has already displayed a flair for writing, as her parents Esteban Bautista and Gloria Torres were into composing and poetry-writing. She studied Journalism in the Lyceum of the Philippines but at some point stopped to pursue writing. At the age of 16, she began writing and her first works were published in the magazine Liwayway. As her writing career began to flourish, she garnered positions in writing organization such as vice-president of the Screenwriters Guild of the Philippines and the chair of the Kapisanan ng mga Manunulat ng Nobelang Popular. In the course of her life, several of her works won awards. Her novels Dekada ‘70, ‘GAPÔ, and Bata, Bata, Pa’no Ka Ginawa? all won Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature. It is certain that Bautista has truly carved a mark in the field of writing, as she has also gained recognition from the Philippine's Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature and the Surian ng Wikang Pambansa in 1987.

Overview of Literary Works

Lualhati Bautista is well-known for her novels, but she has also penned several poems and short stories. Additionally, she is also a movie and television scriptwriter. In her works, one of Bautista’s trademark is her use of the Tagalog language, despite how critics of her time saw the use of native language as unacceptable to the elite. She is also known for her brutal honesty in tackling controversial issues. In fact, Bautista’s several compositions were banned and censored at the time of the Marcos Regime. Moreover, she is recognized for incorporating political themes in her works. According to Veritas (as cited by Peletz & Ong), “Where other writers simply hinted by using vague metaphors and parallel cases in other countries, Lualhati Bautista...named names, cited actual atrocities, and pointed an unerring where the blame lies.” (1998, p. 217). An example of this is her first screenplay named Sakada (1976), for the military confiscated copies of the script since it talks about the troubles faced by Philippine peasants. Another distinct feature of her writing is her exploration of female themes through the portrayal of female protagonists who undergo trials both at home and in the workplace.

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