Authors & Books

National Artist for Film and Broadcast Arts (2022)

Ricky Lee (aka Ricardo Lee) is a prolific screenwriter for film and television. He is a journalist, playwright, and a prize winning fictionist. Lee emerged as a screenwriter in the late 1970s as part of the generation of filmmakers who ushered the “Second Golden Age of Philippine Cinema.” Across four decades, he wrote haunting and historic sequences, scenes, and lines that became the bases for the career defining performances of some of the nations most outstading artists. He showed that a script is an art form that can agitate, philosophize, and entertain. For his stories and screenplays, he received prizes from the Manunuri ng Pelikulang Pilipino, the Young Critics Circle, the Filipino Academy of Movie Arts and Sciences (FAMAS), the Film Academy of the Philippines (FAP), and the Metro Manila Film Festival (MMFF), among others. Lee brought his cinematic sensibilities to the broadcast arts and wrote drama series, and “telesines” for television. He has offered free workshops has trained countless writers who have made a name for themselves. He taught at the University of the Philippines (Diliman and Manila), Ateneo de Manila University, New Era College, University of the East, De La Salle University, and University of Santo Tomas. Among his awards are the Centennial Honors for the Arts from the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) in 2000, the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2000 Cinemanila International Film Festival, the 2003 Natatanging Gawad Urian by the Manunuri ng Pelikulang Pilipino, the 2015 Gawad Plaridel by the University of the Philippines (UP), the 2016 International Film Festival Manhattan (IFFM) Lifetime Achievement Award in Scriptwriting, the 2018 Gawad Dangal ni Balagtas by the Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino (KWF), the 2018 Apolinario Mabini Media Awards by the Polytechnic University of the Philippines (PUP), the 2019 MMFF Hall of Fame, the 2020 FAMAS Lifetime Achievement Award for Scriptwriting, and the 2020 Camera Obscura Artistic Excellence Award by the Film Development Council of the Philippines (FDCP). He was also conferred the doctor of humanities, honoris causa, by PUP in 2019.

Source: National Commission for Culture and the Arts | ncca.gov.ph

Arteena Lefty is a Cebuana visual storyteller passionate about culture, experiences, and travel. She has represented not only her hometown, Bogo City, Cebu, in painting competitions but also Region 7 in national contests organized by the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health since 2016.

Most of her work reflects Cebu’s rich culture, showcased on her Instagram page @arteenalefty. Her introduction to the comics industry began in 2019 with Kawangis Publishing’s Anyare? card game, followed by the release of her debut comic Unang Kadaugan in 2021, which became a finalist in the Filipino Readers’ Choice Awards in 2022. Her latest release with the Kawangis is the Pista Playing Cards. Currently, she continues to collaborate with different local artists and brands around the Philippines.

Rio Brigino-Lim currently serves as Head of Programs and Partnerships at Vibal Foundation, Inc., where she leads advocacy and literacy, promoting reading, children’s literature, and book access.

From 2016 to 2024, she was Marketing Manager, spearheading programs that significantly expanded the textbooks, trade books, and education technology brands of Vibal.

She also serves as head of secretariat of the International Board on Books for Young People Philippines.

Avid Liongoren has made two feature films, several shorts, hundreds of commercials and thousands of artworks, and works in both live action and animated productions. He is the founder of Rocketsheep, a tiny indie animation studio made up of highly talented artists who specialize in animation and friendsheep. Their first feature, Saving Sally (2016), was made with the aid of the CNC French film grant. It went on to win the Jury Prize at the Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival (BIFFF), Portugal’s Fantasporto and South Korea’s Seoul International Cartoon and Animation Festiva (SICAF), as well as several other international awards. Their second film, Hayop Ka! (2020) competed at the prestigious Annecy Festival in France and was purchased by Netflix during the height of the pandemic. He is currently hard at work on film adaptations of Filipino graphic novels. In the several years that Avid has been pursuing film, he has yet to experience financial success so he is always willing to sell his internal organs to fund his projects.

Ipat G. Luna has been engaged in environmental law and policy practice for over three decades. She has managed several foundations and organizations for the conservation of the environment, built local consensus on important policy decisions affecting natural resources and habitats, particularly in protected areas and wetlands and published numerous works in these fields while working in various non-profit organizations and their projects. Before joining government in 2016, she was engaged in independent consulting work as well as community assistance on environmental issues. She was designated as Undersecretary and later Regional Executive Director at the Calabarzon Region of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources and was detailed to the Office of Deputy Speaker Loren Legarda until August 2021. Ms. Luna is currently an independent consultant for variouls government policy initiatives, and is a naturalist — a native tree enthusiast, a birdwatcher, sourdough baker and a trained rescue diver.

Over the past two decades, Lio Mangubat has worked as an editor in various print and digital publications in the Philippines, including Spot.ph, Spin.ph, and the Philippine editions of K-Zone and Men’s Health. He has also written for the local editions of Cosmopolitan, Top Gear, Town & Country, and Esquire. In 2021, he founded the independent podcast The Colonial Dept., which continues to bring long-lost stories of Philippine history to life. Select episodes of this podcast were adapted into the book Silk, Silver, Spices, Slaves: Lost Tales from the Philippine Colonial Period, 1565-1946, published in 2024 by Singaporean publisher Faction Press. Lio currently works as the Editor-in-Chief of the Philippine publishing house Summit Books.

Jerico Ray L. Marte is a 38-year-old freelance illustrator who currently does farm work by day with his parents and illustrating commissioned art work by night. He finished Communication Arts studies in 2008 at the University of Santo Tomas in the Philippines. He worked as a production assistant and segment producer for Hero TV until early 2010 and proceeded to do various production-related jobs such as cooking shows and music videos. Sometime in 2014, he made his first official comic book Tanod along with writer and musician Gabriel Chee Kee. He has illustrated for Criselda Yabes in 2023 with her novella Barcelona, which became a 42nd National Book award finalist in the Best Short Fiction Book in English category, and Paolo Herras in 2016 with Strange Natives: The Forgotten Memories of a Forgetful Old Woman, also a finalist in the 36th National Book award under the Best Graphic Literature Category. Strange Natives is now printed in German language and is soon to be printed in Italian and French.

Dorian S. Merina is a poet, journalist and translator who lives in the Northern Philippines. He is the author of Di Achichúk: Poems and Images from Batanes (Ateneo de Manila University Press), winner of the 2020 Gintong Aklat Award and a finalist for the Philippines’ National Book Award, two chapbooks of poetry, Stone of the Fish, and The Changegiver, and a spoken word album, Heaven is a Second Language. His new book, yndio arxipelago, will be released by the University of the Philippines Press in late 2025.

For more than fifteen years, Merina has led a community-based project to record and document Laji, the indigenous oral poetry of Batanes. His archiving and translating efforts are open to the public at ivatanlaji.com, a digital space that also preserves the songs, testimonies and stories of elder Laji singers. He is the co-founder of the community library, Aklatan Savidug, in Sabtang, Batanes, and teaches media studies at the University of the Philippines, Diliman. He is a tribal member of the Ivatan people of Batanes and is of mixed ancestry (Filipino – Irish – German). More about him at dorianmerina.com.

National Artist for Literature (2018)

A teacher and scholar, essayist and fictionist, and cultural and literary historian, Resil Mojares is acknowledged as a leading figure in the promotion of regional literature and history. As founding director of the Cebuano Studies Center—an important research institution which placed Cebu in the research and documentation map—he pioneered Cebuano and national identity formation. As a leading figure in cultural and literary history, he networked actively in many organizations. For over 50 years, Mojares has published in diverse forms (fiction, essay, journalism, scholarly articles, and books) across a wide range of discipline (literature, history, biography, cultural studies, and others). To date, he has 17 published books (3 more in the press) and edited, co-edited, or co-authored 11 books, and written numerous articles for popular and scholarly publications.

Notable Works:

Origins and Rise of the Filipino Novel: A Generic Study of the Novel Until 1940
(Quezon City, UP Press, 1983; second ed. 1998)
The Man Who Would Be President: Serging Osmeña and Philippine Politics
(Cebu: Maria Cacao, 1986)
Waiting for Mariang Makiling: Essays on Philippine Cultural History
(Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2002)
Theater in Society, Society in Theater: Social History of a Cebuano Village, 1840-1940 (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1985)
The War Against the Americans: Resistance and Collaboration in Cebu, 1899-1906 (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1999)
House of Memory: Essays (Metro Manila: Anvil Publishing, 1997)
Brains of the Nation: Pedro Paterno, T.H. Pardo de Tavera, Isabelo de los Reyes and the Production of Modern Knowledge
(Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2006)
Isabelo’s Archive (Metro Manila: Anvil Publishing, 2013)

Source: National Commission for Culture and the Arts | ncca.gov.ph

Russell Molina is currently the Chief Digital Officer and founding partner of advertising agency Seven A.D., seven-time winner of the prestigious 4As as Independent Agency of the Year. With close to two decades of advertising experience, he has worked on the world’s biggest brands.

Molina is also a published children’s book author and graphic fictionist with over thirty books to his name. His stories have won in the Palanca Awards, PBBY Salanga Awards, PBBY Larry Alcala Illustrator’s Prize and the National Book Awards. He was also a part of the Honour List of the International Board on Books for Young People. In 2022, Molina was awarded the lifetime achievement award UMPIL’s Gawad Pambansang Alagad ni Balagtas for his valuable contribution to children’s literature.

Ace Vincent Molo is officer-in-charge of the Editorial and Production Section at the Ateneo de Manila University Press, and is an eight-time Publisher of the Year awardee at the National Book Awards. He joined the university press as junior editor in 2021, and has extensive experience in academic, literary, and legal publishing as well as in book and graphic design. He recently received the Special Award for Book Design for two works at the 2024 Gintong Aklat Awards of the Book Development Association of the Philippines, and he was a finalist for Best Book Design at the 42nd National Book Awards.

Asa Montenejo is a trained architect, practicing graphic designer and illustrator, and president of her family’s business, pioneering children’s book publishing house, Adarna House.

Ambeth R. Ocampo, Senator Gil J. Puyat Professor at Ateneo de Manila University, and Distinguished Professorial Lecturer at De La Salle University, is a Public Historian and Independent Curator whose research covers the 19th Century Philippines: its art, culture, and the people who figure in the birth of the Filipino nation. He writes Looking Back, the longest-running editorial page column on history for the Philippines Daily Inquirer. Among his 35 books, Rizal Without the Overcoat has been in print for the past 35 years. Professor Ocampo previously served as President, City College of Manila; President, Philippine Historical Association; Co-Chair, Manila Historical and Heritage Commission; Chairman, National Historical Commission of the Philippines and concurrently Chairman, National Commission for Culture and the Arts. He has held academic appointments at University of the Philippines (Diliman and Baguio), De La Salle University, Chulalongkorn University, Kyoto University, Sophia University, and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. His work in public history has been recognized through various honors and awards: the Fukuoka Academic Prize, Ten Outstanding Young Men, Metrobank Outstanding Teacher Award, and a Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship. He was conferred the Spanish Order of Civil Merit, the French Order of Arts and Letters, and from the Philippines as Knight Grand Officer (Knights of Rizal), the Order of Lakandula (Rank of Bayani),and the Presidential Medal of Merit. In another life, he was a Benedictine monk known as Dom. Ignacio Maria, OSB. Today, he publishes history on his growing Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube channels.

Dina Ocampo is a Professor at the University of the Philippines College of Education where she teaches courses on literacy development, difficulties and research. Presently, she is co-convenor of the Education Research Program at the UP Center for Integrative and Development Studies. She is also the current editor-in-chief of the Philippine Journal on Education Studies. She was Dean of the University of the Philippines College of Education from 2010 to 2013, and from 2013 to 2017 served as Undersecretary for Curriculum and Instruction at the Department of Education. She continues to collaborate with local and international peers in the academe, government and nongovernmental organizations on shared advocacies. Presently, she is a member of the technical committee on teacher education of the Second Congressional Commission on Education (EDCOM II).

Katrina F. Olan is the best-selling Pinay sci-fi author, a komiks and webtoon creator, and an Associate Creative Director. She writes about robots, romance and revenge.

Her works have been featured at literary events such as the Philippine Book Festival, Manila International Book Fair, Frankfurt Book Fair, London Book Fair, Aarhus Art Bubble Tegneserie Festival, Southeast Asian Literary Circle Festival, Philippine International Comics Festival, Singapore Comic Con, Angoulême International Comics Festival, and San Diego Comic Con.

Tablay – her best-selling novel — is one of the most loved Filipino science fiction titles. It is also being adapted into a graphic novel, with a successful preview issue debut. Her other works include Makina, Skies Above, and Our Next Seven Weeks. She is also the writer of Sagittarius with Whilce Portacio, Apl de Ap, Kajo Baldisimo and Toon City Manila.

When not writing books, she leads advertising campaigns at an award-winning agency, crafting integrated marketing communication plans for top brands. She specializes in marketing tech, energy, and vehicles, and also writes scripts for commercials on TV, Radio and Digital. Katrina has represented the country at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity 2018 and was the first-ever Filipino student of the Google Creative Campus in Silicon Valley.

She hopes to inspire more women to write science fiction, and uplift the Philippine creative economy. She loves pop culture, travel, D&D, and hopes to pilot a mecha in her lifetime.

Frances Ong holds a master’s degree in Children’s and Adolescent Literature from the University of Surrey-Roehampton in London, United Kingdom. She is the Managing Editor at Tahanan Books for Young Readers, where she has overseen the production and publication of dozens of children’s books. Among the titles she has shepherded through all phases of production are Ay Naku!, Tagu-Taguan, Mang Andoy’s Signs, and the Halo-Halo Histories series—all recipients of the (Philippine) National Children’s Book Award. Fran is also the sectoral representative for publishers of the Philippine Board on Books for Young People.

Charlson Ong has published four collections of short fiction Men of the East and other stories, Woman of Amkaw and other stories, Conversion and other fictions, and Of that Other Country we now speak as well as five novels An Embarrassment of Riches, Banyaga: A Song of War, Blue Angel/White Shadow and White Lady Black Christ, The Arhat Son. His short fiction has been compiled in Sojourner, Settler, Seer (MILFLORES, 2024).

He has won the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Short Story in English, the PH National Book Award for both short fiction and the novel. He has also won a Filipino Academy of Motion Picture Arts (FAMAS) Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for TANABATA’S WIFE that he wrote co-produced and co-directed.

He is a board member of Philippine Chapter of the International PEN.

Marga Ortigas is a veteran international journalist and bestselling author from Manila. After decades of reporting from the frontlines of conflict and climate change for CNN and Al Jazeera, she stepped away from the camera and focused on the page, with her first four books published by Penguin Random House Southeast Asia. Her novel The House on Calle Sombra, an epic family saga, was highly-acclaimed as a lyrical if troubled love letter to her native Philippines, while her second book,There Are No Falling Stars in China (& Other LIfe Lessons from a Recovering Journalist), is an inspirational collection of essays from her decades on the field as a reporter. Her two most recent works, God’s Ashes and WTF?!: Woman Turning F*fty, have been featured in book fairs across Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, and India.

Marga was a British Council Chevening Scholar and was awarded by the International Committee of the Red Cross for Humanitarian Reporting on the Philippines. A storyteller at heart, she continues to write—both nonfiction and fiction—with the urgency of a journalist and the intimacy of a poet.

Ned Parfan is the author of three collections of poetry: The Murmur Asylum, Tilt Me and I Bend, and Beloved Antimatter, all published by the University of the Philippines Press. The Vanished, his translation of Chuckberry J. Pascual’s Ang Nawawala published by 19th Avenida Publishing House, was a finalist for Best Translated Book at the National Book Awards in 2024. An assistant professor at the University of Santo Tomas, he currently serves as director of the UST Publishing House and is a member of the board of trustees of the Book Development Association of the Philippines.

Beth Parrocha is a Children’s Picture Book Illustrator with a Bachelor’s Degree in fine Arts, major in Visual Communication, University of the Philippines, QC.

Founding member of Ang INK – Ang illustrador ng Kabataan, the Philippines’ first and only organization of artists dedicated to Children’s illustration.

She has illustrated more than a hundred picture books and is in the process of doing more.

A number of her works has been translated into several languages and has been given national and international awards. In the last five years her works has been recognized, awarded and has been engaged in the following:

• 2021 International Indie Children’s Book Cover Award in the USA for the Pencil Who Would Not Write, published by ABC Educational Development Center
• 7th National Children’s Book Awards Best Reads, 2001-2021 for “BULUL”, together with Mary Ann Ordinario, published by ABC Educational Center
• 7th National Children’s Book Awards Best Reads 2000-2001 for “Ako ay may Kiki”, together with Glenda Oris, published by Lampara Books.
• AFCC Singapore BIGG Curator, 2023
• Key Visual Artist Philippine Book Fair, 2024
• Key Visual Artist for AFCC Singapore, 2024
• 2024 Winner, CMMA Catholic Mass Media Awards for “titser Nanay” with Genaro Gojo Cruz, published by Lampara Books