Philippine literature is as rich as its history of conquest and resistance. It is vibrant with epics, myths, poetic forms and jousts, and stories that have survived almost four centuries of colonization, passed on from generation to generation, by word of mouth and by printer’s ink, and have continued to influence and shape, to some degree or another, contemporary writing in all its new and varied forms such as speculative fiction, climate fiction, graphic novels and comics, and new adult. What we have is a uniquely Filipino mesh of cultures: indigenous and Southeast Asian, overlain with European old world, with American education, and expressed in the clear, undeniable voices of contemporary literature.
Special mention should be made in this context of young writers. More than 30% of our population are young people, who with such fresh energy bear new ideas in both literary content and form.
Tremendously empowered by technology that’s like putty in their hands, they write and read on as many platforms as possible and in new genres as climate fiction, noir, speculative fiction, young adult, new adult, romance, pop fiction as fantasy and mystery, and most of all, graphic novels. They write in more languages than just English and Filipino. Jonaxx, in her early 30’s and based in Cagayan de Oro (Mindanao), is read on Wattpad by 5.5 million young people who intensely follow her pop fiction (she has her own Jonaxx app). At literary festivals, her fans scream as if she were a rock star.
In the traditional English and Filipino trajectories, young writers are winning not just the Palanca awarads but even international prizes and get to be published by foreign publishers even as they write from Mindanao or the Visayas.
More than half of translation rights that are sold, and continue to be sold internationally, are graphic novels. And though these may be text-bound to speech balloons, the art is always stunning and the substance mystical and spiritual.
The four centuries of colonization of the Philippines began in the second half of the 1500s when the islands came under Spanish control. In 1898, the archipelago became a direct colony of the United States and remained so until the end of World War II. One of our respected women journalists and essayists known for her wit and irreverence, the late Carmen Guerrero Nakpil, in her book of essays Not Woman Enough, summed up this part of our history in a single sentence: we Filipinos have been raised in a convent for 331 years and in Hollywood for 50 years.
She makes light of it but doesn’t dismiss it— this national trauma of ours that explains our being a bundle of contradictions. It has certainly made our literature and writing interesting and unpredictable, rousing and spirited.
National Artist for Literature, Bienvenido Lumbera, looked at our literary development as “an alternation of assertion and acquiescence by the Filipino creative imagination within a cultural setting fostered by our people’s interaction with two different sets of colonial masters.” Every story comes from an intercultural process, whether or not the writer is aware of it. Our people speak 135 languages, all bullied out of publishing by the dominant English, until in the 90s, when the Tagalog romance paperbacks became runaway bestsellers.
Ten percent of our total population of 112 million live abroad. These include the communities of residents and overseas workers in the logistics and health services who read the Tagalog paperback romances exported to them from Manila. Their international schools also buy their textbooks from Manila publishers.
There is literature being written among these communities, mostly on online platforms like Wattpad, and others. Their individual interaction with host cultures enriches or politically colors their writing. Their collective experience is made even more distinctive and diverse, and so with the writing and other artistic pursuits.
National Artist for Literature, Nick Joaquin, whose writing, according to many, is unmatched in his generation, believes the overlaying of cultures on top of the native and the Asian is not trauma or victimization of colonial subjects but the enrichment of a people who welcomed the tools and technologies Spain brought to the islands. He says in his classic book Culture and History (Anvil Publishing, 2004 and 2017), we should abandon the what-ifs and be at peace with our past, and even take pride in our hybrid heritage.
A revered woman fictionist, and feminist Ninotchka Rosca, swears “Joaquin’s English has the melody of Spanish and Tagalog. Joaquin was the first Filipino writer to focus on the impossible contradictions of a tribal civilization overlain by Spanish and American world views. And because that tribal civilization was woman-centered, Joaquin’s heroines are complex, romantic, and defiant.”
The Filipino literary landscape is vibrant with book launches, public readings, writing workshops, literary contests and book awards, fairs and festivals. Indie presses are making a mark for themselves and winning awards and prizes for their books. Regional indie presses, like Istorya Studios, Savage Mind, Kasingkasing Press, and Aklat Alamid are now established entities in their localities. They publish in their local languages and more of them are emerging. In 2023, the number of new books released was 10,297 titles, the highest ever in the last ten years. 13,018 new titles appeared in 2024 — a 26% increase. However these figures are still low compared to our neighbors’ output. The free flow of American books into our market continues from the time the Philippines were a US colony. The country is still regarded as part of the American book market.
Production is across genres: children’s books, crime fiction, romance (English & Filipino), graphic novels and comics, academic and scholarly, biographies and memoirs, poetry and fiction.
Overall sales, as publishers reported to the National Book Development Board, the agency of the Philippine government for the book-publishing industry, in 2023 went up to PhP11.1B, or almost 178 million euro.
There is a robust network of distribution and purchase points making sure books reach readers. As in any other industry, the pandemic changed things. The biggest change was boosting online stores, like Shopee and Lazada, which started to include books in their product range. Without the huge commission brick-and-mortar stores ask for, some publishers doubled, even tripled their sales.
A related upside of the pandemic was digital acceleration for most, if not all, businesses. Suddenly cashless payments and online fund transfers became the norm. Our e-commerce has yet to catch up with that of neighbor countries but its potential has never been as clear. Statista, a global data and business intelligence platform, estimates that the US$15 billion e-commerce market in 2022 will grow to US$60 billion by 2030.
For a country where people still struggle for basic necessities, books need not be purchased — they can be read in public libraries. In a few provinces and cities, local governments actively maintain libraries, yet the challenge remains: to build the infrastructure for a functioning nationwide public network. There are various private sector initiatives which supplement public libraries— they also collect and distribute book donations.
The National Book Development Board in 2021 set up a network of alternative reading and storytelling centers. Today they are in 113 spaces.
There are no literary agents in our publishing firmament: publishers are designated to represent their authors so that between them is a thing more than a professional relationship—when it’s good and equal, it evolves into a friendship.
The literary ecosystem is well in place.
The Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature, with prizes in 20 categories and 50 plus prize winners every year, were founded in 1950 and remain the most prestigious literary prize for any work. The Palanca Memorial Awards have become almost like a rite of passage for every writer. The categories include writing in the regional languages. The Manila Critics Circle has also been recognizing the best books since 1981.
Among writers organizations, PEN Philippines was founded in 1957 and UMPIL or Writers Union of the Philippines in 1974. The Silliman Writers Workshop, inaugurated in 1963, is the longest-running university-based workshop in Asia today. Five other top universities also host such summer workshops.
Book fairs are another indicator of vitality. For instance, the Manila International Book Fair was inaugurated in 1979. The competitions, awards, writing workshops, and book fairs I have described are long-standing literary traditions in the Philippines, the backbone of literature. Simply put, they cover the whole literary life cycle: writing, community, publishing, recognition, and readership.
Philippine literature, enabled by digital technology that has been democratized, has in the last decade been getting the attention of publishers abroad, whether small or big. In the 90s, our writers who wanted to break into the international market, had to migrate to New York or London. That is no longer the case— we have writers who remain in their hometowns, some far from Manila, and get published by both US mainstream and indie presses. Some have become book trade professionals for international companies — not just as writers but also as editors, illustrators, and graphic or book designers.
“Every writer contributes to a collective voice that seeks and defines who we are and where we are heading. Ours is a complicated history, and we are multitudes all over the world,” to quote Eric Gamalinda, one of our prize-winning fictionists and poets who migrated to the United States in the 1990s.
Scholars have long been debating these difficult matters. We believe all texts written within a nation, or a notion of that nation, constitute our literary identity. Taking note of our country’s long history of diaspora, this identity is bound to be a fluid concept.
We know what books are: how they are inhabited by the spirit of the times; how they are fleshed out by curious, brilliant minds; how they are forged by creative and imaginative forces; haunted by the ghosts of revolutions past; moved by the psyche of every new generation; shaped by the life force of nature and our struggles with it; inspired by the wisdom of our ancestors; and sustained by the anima of a safe and just future.
Books engender other arts and inform cultural practice. They cross over to films and theater.
To end this story of our literary landscape, I shall quote a line from a poem by Gemino Abad, the latest recipient of the Order of National Artist in 2022: The future is shaped by words.
Our three living National Artists for Literature:
- Resil Mojares, our leading scholar and intellectual who is Professor Emeritus at the University of San Carlos in Cebu in the Visayas Island;
- Virgilio Almario, prolific poet in Filipino, translator and lexicographer; and
- Gemino Abad. A poet in English, which he considers is a Philippine language. He is a literary historian and anthologist of works of poetry and fiction.
Where do I go from here? We suggest Fernando Gentilini, Diego Marani and John Bengan [italiano/English]