The Filipino Writer in English

(By the thirties) "The Filipino writer in English may be said to have mastered the language well enough to enable him to observe the life around him without the language interfering... he felt he had sufficient control of it to be able to look at his material with a clear vision, unobstructed by language only partially possessed."

"The writer is a writer exactly because he sees with language, not just with his eyes: only that has been which has been verbalized. The harsh truth is that the writer is a writer exactly because he lives with words: until experience is transfigured into words, it is not experience."

-Francisco Arcellana, Period of Emergence: The Short Story
Hailed as a National Artist of the Philippines for Literature in 1990.

This short biography is lifted from the: Philippine National Commission For Culture and the Arts (NCAA) website.

Francisco Arcellana, writer, poet, essayist, critic, journalist and teacher, is one of the most important progenitors of the modern Filipino short story in English. He pioneered the development of the short story as a lyrical prose-poetic form... Arcellana's published books are Selected Stories (1962), Poetry and Politics: The State of Original Writing in English in the Philippines Today (1977), The Francisco Arcellana Sampler (1990).

Some of his short stories are Frankie, The Man Who Would Be Poe, Death in a Factory, Lina, A Clown Remembers, Divided by Two, and his poems being The Other Woman, This Being the Third Poem This Poem is for Mathilda, To Touch You and I Touched Her, among others.