The country’s best writers and cultural institutions paid homage this year to the 100th anniversary of the late National Artist Nick Joaquin. Ironically, had Joaquin been around, he might never have allowed the tributes and accolades given in his honor. Or maybe, he would, but at great discomfort. Said writer Jose ‘Pete’ Lacaba, “Sinasabi sa amin ni Nick pag dumadalaw kami sa mga burol ‘ayaw ko ng mga tribute-tribute. Ibalot niyo na lang ako sa banig, itapon niyo ako sa Pasig River.’ Pero tinatanggap din naman niya pag binigyan siya ng award [Nick would tell us whenever we were in a wake, ‘I don’t like tributes. Just wrap me in a mat and throw me in the Pasig River. But he still would accept every time he is given an award].”

Europe, the seat of everything that was grand, powerful, and prosperous, was caught in the teeth of the First World War, the year Nicomedes Márquez Joaquín was born on May 4, 1917. It was half a world away from a boy who would emerge half a century later as one of the greatest literary minds in a poor and exploited country still caught in its own, long drawn-out war of independence in 1917.

“Our sense ... of our country is a sustained act of imagination. From that vantage, it can be said that our writers and artists, who are men and women of imagination, create our country (italics mine). That is to say: they evoke those images of ourselves as we live life day and night, those images of ourselves which we share and by which we recognize our nativity. We are our own best interpreters of our history and culture because it is we who have lived through that history and created our own values by which we live.” —National Artist for Literature Gemino Abad

It’s a four-year-old book of poetry—a slim book, all of 90 pages, with 55 poems published in 2022, ready to be read and absorbed. And for English-proficient third-millennium Filipinos—whether aspiring for comfort or already living in ease—the images spun by 16 of the 55 poems hark back to a time beyond their consciousness. That is why Jim Pascual Agustin’s Bloodred Dragonflies can be the metaphorical blood transfusion required to pump poignant, visual, and painful cells of old memory into the veins of the unconcerned and unaware.

It was the type of news that jarred the senses because it was the first time it happened in the country. Government officials called it an “unprecedented tragedy.” On the morning of June 22 of this year, two students, aged 14 and 15, bypassed the security checks of San Jose National High School in Tacloban City. One student carried in his bag a Glock 17 pistol, the other carried a .38-caliber revolver. At past 9 a.m. both opened fire indiscriminately inside the school’s crowded rooms and hallways. And then the shooting stopped, but not after killing three students and wounding 20 more.

In August 2025, an 82-year-old man named Jose Takei boarded a flight from Manila to Osaka, carrying with him eight decades of an unanswered question. Takei was born in Laguna near the end of World War II, the son of...

DON RAMON PARDO ROCESPublisher, Graphic & Graphic Weekly1927-1941; 1948-1965 In the early decades of American colonial rule in the Philippines, there were rich and influential Hispanic-Filipino families who invested in publishing. One of them was the Roces clan. The family pioneered...

I have always been interested in where modern Philippine culture began, how it spread, and what images were used to represent the nation. Print media is central to that history. Before television and the internet, magazines helped Filipinos imagine the...

One could tell a lot of things about an elected government official by looking at his desk nameplate. This is what first crossed my mind inside the office of Biñan City Mayor Angelo “Gel” Alonte.

The Philippines Graphic, alongside the BusinessMirror, the Pilipino Mirror, and the entire ALC Media Group, deeply mourns the passing of Philippines Graphic Literary Editor Marra PL. Lanot.

What a lakeside island community reveals about learning, resilience, and reform in the Philippines Seen from the shores of Laguna de Bay, Talim Island rises from the country’s largest lake, cut off from the mainland with no bridges linking the...

There is a certain rhythm to Batangas City—one that reveals itself in the steady movement of people, services, and systems that increasingly seem to work in sync.