Held on May 7, 2024 at the Samsung Hall, SM Aura Premier, Taguig City
SHORT STORY:
1st place: Rosario Garcellano for “The Heart Wants What It Wants” (Philippines Graphic Reader, July 2023)
Journalist Rosario A. Garcellano, lately of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, is now executive editor of the digital newsmagazine CoverStory.ph. She is the author of Necessary Contexts: Essays for Our Times (Gantala Press and Alfredo F. Tadiar Library, 2022), and Mean Streets: Essays on the Knife Edge (Kalikasan Press, 1991). She studied at the University of the Philippines Diliman and at the College of the Holy Spirit Manila.
2nd Place: “Near Paradise” by Criselda Yabes (Philippines Graphic Reader, March 2023)
Criselda Yabes is a journalism graduate from the University of the Philippines Diliman, covering major events in the 1980s for foreign news agencies. Her first book, The Boys from the Barracks, chronicles the coup attempts against the new democracy of that era. She moved to Paris, France, in the early 2000s, later returning home to write more about the military and Mindanao, where she grew up in Zamboanga City. Her first novel, Crying Mountain, which is on the Sulu uprising of the 1970s, won the U.P. Centennial Literary Prize in 2008 and was long-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2010. Her second novel, Broken Islands, set in the Visayas with the super typhoon Yolanda, in 2013 as backdrop, was published in 2019. Her most recent book, Battle of Marawi, is a full account of the five-month siege in 2017 of the Islamic capital of Lanao del Sur.
3rd Place: “Horror Vacui” by Yvette Tan (Philippines Graphic Reader, June 2023)
Yvette Tan is an agriculture editor and a horror writer. She’s always asked how she reconciles both interests, and she always answers that both involve staving off the apocalypse. Find out more about her at yvettetan.com.
POET OF THE YEAR: F. Jordan Carnice, “Two Poems for 2023” (Philippines Graphic Reader, September 2023)
F. Jordan Carnice is a writer and visual artist based in Bohol, Philippines. He was published in Anomaly, MIDLVLMAG, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine, among other publications, and in the forthcoming issue 17 of Likhaan: The Journal of Contemporary Philippine Literature and Anthology of Southeast Asian Eco-Writing through the University of Hawaii Press’s Manoa Journal. He authored two poetry chapbooks—Weights & Cushions (2018) and How to Make an Accident (2019). He was recently hailed as Poet of the Year in the Nick Joaquin Literary Awards 2023. He can be found online through Instagram, Twitter, and Threads (@thebullfrog__).
