John Bengan
John Bengan is a writer and translator from the Philippines whose work has appeared in Likhaan, Kritika Kultura, BooksActually's Gold Standard, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Words Without Borders, LIT, Shenandoah, and World Literature Today. He holds an MFA in creative writing from The New School. A recipient of a Ford Foundation International Fellowship, he has won prizes from the Philippines Free Press Literary Awards and the Carlos Palanca Memorial Award for his short fiction. He lives in Davao City.
If you like author John Bengan here is the list of authors you may also like
Buy books on AmazonTotal similar authors (31)
-
V.J. Campilan
VJ Campilan is a content writer specializing in tech, science, and business trends. All My Lonely Islands was her thesis for her MFA Creative Writing degree, after which it won the Grand Prize for the 2015 Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards, the Philippines' most prestigious and long-running literary award. It also won the Madrigal-Gonzalez Best First Book Award and the Gintong Aklat Award. It was recently announced as a finalist for the 37th National Book Awards (Manila).
Buy books on Amazon
All My Lonely Islands is currently available at NBS, PowerBooks, Anvil Publishing Online, Amazon & Kobo.
VJ resides in Manila. -
Estrella D. Alfon
Estrella D. Alfon was a well-known prolific Filipina author who wrote in English. Because of unwavering and poor health, she could manage only an A. A. degree from the University of the Philippines. She then became a member of the U. P. writers club and earned and was given the privileged post of National Fellowship in Fiction post at the U. P. Creative Writing Center. She died in the year 1983 at the age of 66.
Buy books on Amazon -
Katrina Tuvera
Katrina Tuvera is a Filipino author, creative writing professor, and communications specialist known for her award-winning novels and short story collections. Her works often explore Philippine history, politics, and culture. Tuvera has authored several novels, including The Jupiter Effect (2006), set during the Philippine martial law years, and The Collaborators (2022), which examines complicity in Philippine history from World War II to the turn of the millennium. Her writing has earned her a National Book Award from the Manila Critics Circle for both Testament and Other Stories and The Jupiter Effect, as well as a Carlos Palanca Memorial Award and a Philippines Graphic Award for Literature.
Buy books on Amazon -
Marguerite Duras
Marguerite Germaine Marie Donnadieu , known as Marguerite Duras, was a French novelist, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, and experimental filmmaker. Her script for the film Hiroshima mon amour (1959) earned her a nomination for Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards.
Buy books on Amazon -
Raymond Carver
Carver was born into a poverty-stricken family at the tail-end of the Depression. He married at 19, started a series of menial jobs and his own career of 'full-time drinking as a serious pursuit', a career that would eventually kill him. Constantly struggling to support his wife and family, Carver enrolled in a writing programme under author John Gardner in 1958. He saw this opportunity as a turning point.
Buy books on Amazon
Rejecting the more experimental fiction of the 60s and 70s, he pioneered a precisionist realism reinventing the American short story during the eighties, heading the line of so-called 'dirty realists' or 'K-mart realists'. Set in trailer parks and shopping malls, they are stories of banal lives that turn on a seemingly insignificant detai -
Maggie Nelson
Maggie Nelson is the author of nine books of poetry and prose, many of which have become cult classics defying categorization. Her nonfiction titles include the National Book Critics Circle Award winner and New York Times bestseller The Argonauts (Graywolf Press, 2015), The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (Norton, 2011; a New York Times Notable Book of the Year), Bluets (Wave Books, 2009; named by Bookforum as one of the top 10 best books of the past 20 years), The Red Parts (Free Press, 2007; reissued by Graywolf, 2016), and Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (U of Iowa Press, 2007). Her poetry titles include Something Bright, Then Holes (Soft Skull Press, 2007) and Jane: A Murder (Soft Skull, 2005; finalist for the PEN/ M
Buy books on Amazon -
E.M. Forster
Edward Morgan Forster, generally published as E.M. Forster, was an English novelist, essayist, and short story writer. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society. His humanistic impulse toward understanding and sympathy may be aptly summed up in the epigraph to his 1910 novel Howards End: "Only connect".
Buy books on Amazon
He had five novels published in his lifetime, achieving his greatest success with A Passage to India (1924) which takes as its subject the relationship between East and West, seen through the lens of India in the later days of the British Raj.
Forster's views as a secular humanist are at the heart of his work, which often depicts the pursuit of person -
Eric Gamalinda
Born and raised in Manila, Eric Gamalinda first published in the Philippines four novels: Planet Waves, Confessions of a Volcano, Empire of Memory, and My Sad Republic; a short story collection, Peripheral Vision; and a collection of poems, Lyrics from a Dead Language. All were written and published in the last decade of the twentieth century to literary acclaim and recognized with National Book Awards and the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards many times over, on top of his nonfiction and plays. His fifth novel, The Descartes Highlands, was shortlisted for the Man Asian Prize. His other US publications include the poetry collections Zero Gravity, winner of the Asian American Literary Prize, and Amigo Warfare; and a short story collection, Peop
Buy books on Amazon -
Jessica Zafra
Jessica Zafra (born 1965) is a fiction writer, columnist, editor, publisher and former television and radio show host. She is known for her sharp and witty writing style. Her most popular books are the Twisted series, a collection of her essays as a columnist for newspaper Today (now Manila Standard Today), as well as from her time as editor and publisher of the magazine Flip. She currently writes a weekly column for The Philippine Star which is called, Emotional Weather Report. She resides in Metro Manila, Philippines, where she is working on her first novel. She also managed the Eraserheads during the 90's.
Buy books on Amazon
Her work often are about current events (both Philippine and international), tennis, movies, music, cats, books, technology and her pe -
F.H. Batacan
Maria Felisa H. Batacan is a Filipino journalist and a writer of crime and mystery fiction. Her work has been published in the Philippines and abroad under the name F.H. Batacan.
Buy books on Amazon
She was a fellow at the 1996 Dumaguete National Writers' Workshop.
Batacan worked in the Philippine intelligence community and then became a broadcast journalist. She attended the University of the Philippines, where she pursued a master's degree in Arts Studies. In 1999 her manuscript, Smaller and Smaller Circles, won the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature Grand Prize for the English Novel. This novel was published in 2002 by the University of the Philippines Press. Although most Filipino English-language fiction works garner a single print run of onl -
Merlinda Bobis
Merlinda Bobis is an award-winning contemporary Philippine-Australian writer who has had 4 novels, 6 poetry books and a collection of short stories published, and 10 dramatic works performed. For her, ‘Writing visits like grace. Its greatest gift is the comfort if not the joy of transformation. In an inspired moment, we almost believe that anguish can be made bearable and injustice can be overturned, because they can be named. And if we’re lucky, joy can even be multiplied a hundredfold, so we may have reserves in the cupboard for the lean times.’
Buy books on Amazon
Born in Tabaco in the Philippines province of Albay, Merlinda Bobis attended Bicol University High School then completed her B.A. at Aquinas University in Legazpi City. She holds post-graduate degr -
Conchitina R. Cruz
Conchitina R. Cruz is Professor at the Department of English and Comparative Literature, University of the Philippines Diliman. She received her PhD in English from State University of New York (SUNY) Albany.
Buy books on Amazon -
Katrina Tuvera
Katrina Tuvera is a Filipino author, creative writing professor, and communications specialist known for her award-winning novels and short story collections. Her works often explore Philippine history, politics, and culture. Tuvera has authored several novels, including The Jupiter Effect (2006), set during the Philippine martial law years, and The Collaborators (2022), which examines complicity in Philippine history from World War II to the turn of the millennium. Her writing has earned her a National Book Award from the Manila Critics Circle for both Testament and Other Stories and The Jupiter Effect, as well as a Carlos Palanca Memorial Award and a Philippines Graphic Award for Literature.
Buy books on Amazon -
Ricky Lee
Filipino screenwriter, journalist, novelist, and playwright.
Buy books on Amazon
He has written more than 150 film screenplays since 1973, earning him more than 50 trophies from various award-giving bodies, including a 2003 Natatanging Gawad Urian Lifetime Achievement Award from the Manunuri ng Pelikulang Pilipino (Filipino Film Critics). As a screenwriter, he has worked with many Filipino film directors, most notably with Lino Brocka and Ishmael Bernal. Many of his films have been screened in the international film festival circuit in Cannes, Toronto, Berlin, among others. -
Estrella D. Alfon
Estrella D. Alfon was a well-known prolific Filipina author who wrote in English. Because of unwavering and poor health, she could manage only an A. A. degree from the University of the Philippines. She then became a member of the U. P. writers club and earned and was given the privileged post of National Fellowship in Fiction post at the U. P. Creative Writing Center. She died in the year 1983 at the age of 66.
Buy books on Amazon -
-
Justin Torres
JUSTIN TORRES grew up in upstate New York. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, Glimmer Train, and other publications. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he is a recipient of the Rolón United States Artist Fellowship in Literature, and is now a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. He has worked as a farmhand, a dog-walker, a creative writing teacher, and a bookseller.
Buy books on Amazon -
-
Ocean Vuong
Ocean Vuong is the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collections Night Sky with Exit Wounds and Time is a Mother, as well as the New York Times bestselling novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. A recipient of the American Book Award and the MacArthur “Genius Grant," he has also worked as a line cook, tobacco harvester, nursing home volunteer, and fast-food server, the latter becoming inspiration for The Emperor of Gladness. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he currently splits his time between Northampton, Massachusetts and New York City.
Buy books on Amazon -
Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta
Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta hails from Manila and holds an MFA from the New School University in NYC. Her first book of poetry, The Proxy Eros, was published in 2008 by Anvil Publishing Inc., the foremost publishing house in the Philippines. Her work has been published in The New York Quarterly and will appear in the forthcoming issue of Defunct, an online literary magazine. She has also received Palanca and Philippines Free Press awards, the top literary honors in the Philippines.
Buy books on Amazon -
Ronaldo S. Vivo Jr.
Ronaldo Soledad Vivo, Jr. is the author of the Dreamland Trilogy—'Ang Kapangyarihang Higit sa Ating Lahat' (The Power Above Us All), 'Ang Bangin sa Ilalim ng Ating mga Paa' (The Abyss Beneath Our Feet), and 'Ang Suklam sa Ating Naaagnas na Balat' (The Loathe Within Our Rotting Flesh). He is an award-winning author, having been a finalist for both the Madrigal-Gonzales First Book Award and the National Book Awards for novels, and a recipient of the Gawad Bienvenido Lumbera for short fiction. He is the founder of UngazPress, a collective of writers from the town of Pateros. As a musician, he operates Sound Carpentry Recordings, which releases music on cassette, CD, and vinyl for worldwide distribution. He also serves as the drummer for bands
Buy books on Amazon -
Mae Coyiuto
Mae Coyiuto is a not-so-young-adult who loves YA fiction. She has published children’s books and YA collections with Anvil Publishing, Philippines. If she's not writing, she's usually fangirling over Beyoncé, tennis, Gilmore Girls, or all of the above.
Buy books on Amazon
Mae has also published under the name Samantha Mae Coyiuto. -
Raphael Bob-Waksberg
Raphael Matthew Bob-Waksberg is an American comedian, writer, producer, actor, and voice actor. He is known as the creator and showrunner of the animated comedy series BoJack Horseman. He is also an executive producer on the animated series Tuca & Bertie.
Buy books on Amazon -
Glenn Diaz
Glenn Diaz’s first book THE QUIET ONES (Ateneo Press) won the Palanca Grand Prize and Philippine National Book Award. His second novel YÑIGA was a finalist for the 2020 Novel Prize. He holds a PhD in creative writing from the University of Adelaide. He lives in Manila.
Buy books on Amazon -
-
Patricia Evangelista
Patricia Evangelista is a trauma journalist and former investigative reporter for the Philippine news company Rappler. Her reporting on armed conflict and disaster was awarded the Kate Webb Prize for exceptional journalism in dangerous conditions. She was a Headlands Artist in Residence, a New America ASU Future Security Fellow, and a fellow of the Logan Nonfiction Program, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma. Her work has earned local and international acclaim. She lives in Manila.
Buy books on Amazon -
Jade Mark Capiñanes
Jade Mark Capiñanes is a Filipino writer. He is the author of the short story collection How to Grieve, published in 2022.
Buy books on Amazon
He won 3rd Prize in the Essay Category of the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature in 2017 and 2024. He was a fellow for novella at the 2025 UP National Writers Workshop, for poetry at the 2023 Iyas National Writers Workshop, and for creative nonfiction at the 2019 Ateneo National Writers Workshop, 2017 University of Santo Tomas National Writers Workshop, and 2016 Davao Writers Workshop.
Born and raised in Davao City, he is currently taking his MFA in Creative Writing at De La Salle University in Manila. -
Anthony Veasna So
Anthony Veasna So was a graduate of Stanford University and earned his MFA in fiction at Syracuse University. His writing has appeared in the New Yorker, n+1, Granta, and ZYZZYVA.
Buy books on Amazon -
Sigrid Marianne Gayangos
Sigrid Marianne Gayangos is a Filipino writer from Zamboanga City. She is the author of "Laut: Stories," a National Book Award finalist, and "Lola Maria’s Candles," a forthcoming bilingual children's book. In 2021, she won the NCCA’s Writers Prize for Fiction, enabling her to complete a collection of short stories in Chavacano, which she is currently translating into English. Gayangos teaches at the University of the Philippines Mindanao and focuses on themes of queer love, identity, and cultural heritage in her works
Buy books on Amazon -
-