The Girl Who Dreamt

She Could Fly

Ang Batang Nanaginip

Na Siya’y Nakalilipad

(original version in Filipino)

£3.00

Passage

Poems 1983-2006

£5.00

The Song of Pulaw

(second edition)

Ang Awit ni Pulaw

(original version in Filipino)

£3.00

ED MARANAN, Filipino writer, was born in Bauan, Batangas and grew up in Baguio City, Philippines. He is a poet, essayist, fictionist, playwright, writer of children’s stories, and translator. He was the Philippine fellow at the Iowa International Writing Program in 1985, National Fellow for Poetry of the UP Creative Writing Center in 1988, participant in the International Writers Residence at Lavigny, Switzerland in 2006, and panelist at the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival in Bali in 2007. He started his writing career in high school. At the age of 16, he won a national essay competition to select the Philippine representative at the 1963 New York Herald Tribune World Youth Forum.

Ed has garnered a total of thirty prizes, for his works in English and Filipino, in the Philippines’ most prestigious literary competition, the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature. He was inducted into the Carlos Palanca Hall of Fame (for multiple-First Prize winners), in 2000. He has also won in other literary competitions such as the Cultural Center of the Philippines Annual Literary Contest, Amado V. Hernandez Playwriting Competition, Institute of National Language poetry competition, Philippines Free Press Literary Awards, Philippine Graphic Nick Joaquin Literary Prize, Filamore Tabios Sr. Memorial Poetry Prize (Meritage Press, USA), and the Philippine Board on Books for Young People (PBBY)-Alfrredo Navarro Salanga Writers Prize, which he won three years in a row, from 1989 to 1991.

Bookmark Inc. recently published Ed’s third book of poetry—Passage / poems 1983-2006. His two earlier collections of prize-winning poetry—Agon: poems and Alab: mga tula—were published by the University of the Philippines Press in 1982. His other publications include: Kudaman, (with Dr. Nicole Revel, Ateneo University Press), a translation into Filipino of a major Palawan ethno-epic, which won a National Book Award citation in 1992; and several prize-winning children’s stories, all published by Bookmark Inc.—The Girl Who Dreamt She Could Fly, The Song of Pulaw, and The Jinx, the Dolphin, and the Deep-Sea Mystery (together with his Filipino versions of these stories).

From 1993 to 2006, Ed worked as information officer of the Philippine Embassy in London, and edited The Philippine Newsletter. While living and working in London, he wrote for various Filipino publications, contributing articles, news features, short stories and poems. He co-edited, and contributed to the book Hinabing Gunita (Woven Memories: The Story of Filipinos in the UK) published in London in May 2004 by the Centre for Filipinos, a UK charity. He also became active as an adviser of a writers group, UMPUK, composed of Filipinos who have been long-time residents in the United Kingdom but continue to propagate their national language, Filipino, while honing their literary skills in English. Ed’s haikus also appeared in The Guardian’s weekly online haiku competition, which encouraged terse, poetic reflections on current themes of topical importance and relevance.

Before his stint in the Philippine diplomatic service, Ed taught graduate courses in Philippine Studies at the University of the Philippines Asian Center in Diliman, Quezon City between 1979 and 1991. He finished his bachelor’s degree in Foreign Service in 1967 at the state university, studied for his master’s degree in political science, at the same time that he taught undergraduate courses in political theory and international relations, also at the UP, from 1970 to 1972. During this time, he became involved with progressive groups such as PAKSA (Panulat para sa Kaunlaran ng Sambayanan), a national organization of left-wing writers, and SAGUPA (Samahan ng mga Guro sa Pamantasan), an informal union of activist faculty members at the state university.

When martial law was declared in 1972, he worked with the underground movement until his arrest in 1976. He spent more than two years in political detention at Bicutan ‘Rehabilitation’ Center, where he continued to be active in cultural work, writing prison plays and poetry. His prison play Ang Panahon ni Cristy was written in Bicutan and won the grand prize for full-length drama in the Palanca awards of 1978. After his release from prison, Ed joined a group of poets and writers called GAT (Galian sa Arte at Tula), and became active in advocacy for Philippine indigenous people, becoming national vice-chairman of TABAK (Tunay na Alyansa ng Bayan Alay sa Katutubo). He also served as board member of the Philippine Peasant Institute (PPI) and AsiaVisions, an alternative media organization, for which he and the late Lito Tiongson produced Fragments, a documentary film on the Philippine crisis under the Cory Aquino regime, with his poetry as the narrative medium.

In 1987, he was awarded a one-month research fellowship in China under an agreement between the Philippine Social Science Center and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. In 1992, he was given a fellowship by the British Council to attend courses in contemporary British poetry (Birkbeck College, University of London), and modern literary theory (Oxford University). In 1993, he was appointed by the Department of Foreign Affairs as information officer of the Philippine diplomatic mission in London.

From his London posting which lasted fourteen years, Ed came back to the Philippines in December 2006 to devote himself full-time to creative writing. His short story Luna’s Land – about the oppression of Filipino peasants during the colonial period – won third prize in the 2006 Nick Joaquin literary competition of the Philippine Graphic magazine. This piece was his translation of his own short story in Filipino, Buwan at Lupa, which won a Palanca third prize, also in 2006. In 2007, he won second place in the Filamore Tabios Sr. Memorial Prize for Poetry sponsored by Meritage Press in the United States, with his retrospective collection of works entitled Star Maps & other poems.

His current literary projects include EJ, a full-length play about two popular heroes of the resistance movement against the Marcos dictatorship: the student leader Edgar Jopson and the reform-minded former governor of Antique and Cory Aquino campaigner Evelio Javier. The play was commissioned by the Cultural Center of the Philippines Tanghalang Pilipino, and will be performed at the CCP starting February 2008. Other ongoing literary projects are a series of books for children focusing on the theme of environmental awareness, and more poetry and fiction.

Back in his homeland, the Philippines, after years of experiencing first hand the Filipino diaspora, he now makes a living as a freelance writer. •

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