Nick Joaquin, winner of the 1996 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Literature, Journalism, and Creative Communications, was “the greatest Filipino writer of his generation,” according to a biographical note written by Resil Mojares. “Over six decades and a half, he produced a body of work unmatched in richness and range by any of his contemporaries. Living a life wholly devoted to the craft of conjuring a world through words, he was the writer’s writer. In the passion with which he embraced his country’s manifold being, he was his people’s writer as well.”
The Filipinas Heritage Library has copies of over 50 books by Joaquin, including two novels; collections of plays, short stories, poems, children’s stories, and reportage; writings on culture, history, and society; biographies; and coffee-table books. The library also has issues of the Philippines Free Press from 1946 to the present. As Quijano de Manila, Joaquin wrote for the Free Press from 1950 to 1970—first as a proofreader and copywriter, later as staff writer, and finally as literary editor.
Nick Joaquin was born on September 15, 1917 in Paco, Manila. His parents were Leocadio Joaquin, an attorney and colonel of the Philippine Revolution, and Salome Marquez, a public schoolteacher. He dropped out of Mapa High School and worked as a mozo (boy apprentice) in a bakery in Pasay, and then as a printer’s devil in the composing department of the Tribune owned by the TVT (Tribune-Vanguardia-Taliba) publishing company.
His first poem was published in the Tribune in 1934, while his first short story, "The Sorrows of Vaudeville," was published in the Sunday Tribune Magazine in 1937. His stories and poems were published in the Herald Mid-Week Magazine and the Sunday Tribune Magazine between 1934 and 1941. He continued to write during the war.
After the war, he wrote his classic stories, including “Summer Solstice,” “May Day Eve,” “Guardia de Honor,” and others. His canonical play, A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino, was first staged in 1955 and was made into a film by Lamberto Avellana in 1965. In the late 1950s he traveled to Spain, the United States, and Mexico on a Rockefeller Foundation creative writing fellowship and a Eugene F. Saxton Fellowship from the publishers of Harper’s Magazine. There he worked on his first novel, The Woman Who Had Two Navels (1961).
Back in Manila, he served on the Board of Censors for Motion Pictures from 1961 to 1972. In 1970 he joined a labor union organized by the workers of Free Press and became its president. Many of his works were first published in the 1970s and 1980s, including Reportage on Crime (where “The House on Zapote Street,” adapted into the film Kisapmata in 1981, appeared), Joaquinesquerie: myth a la mod, Tropical Baroque: four Manila theatricals, his children’s stories, and his countless biographies of such notable personalities as Doy Laurel and the members of the Aquino clan. More biographies were published in the 1990s.
Nick Joaquin was named National Artist for Literature in 1976. Twenty years later, he received the Ramon Magsaysay Award. He wrote columns for the Philippine Daily Inquirer from 1988–1990, and in 1990 served as editor of Philippine Graphic and was publisher of its sister publication, Mirror Weekly. He continued to contribute to various publications until his death in April 2004.
Reference: Resil B. Mojares’s Biography of Nick Joaquin.
http://www.rmaf.org.ph/Awardees/Biography/BiographyJoaquinNic.htm
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
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