Kenneth M.

Apolonia
Grade 12 STEM
Worksheet 14
Contemporary arts

I chose three national artists for literature and these are Francisco Arcellana, Nick Joaquin
and Edith L. Tiempo. Let's start with Francisco Arcellana. He was born on September 16,
1916 and died on August 1, 2002. When he was young, he has an ambition to become a
writer and as he grew old, he achieve his goal or ambition to become bot just only writer but
also more than a writer. He was a Filipino writer, poet, essayist, critic, journalist and teacher.
Arcellana pioneered the development of the short story as a lyrical prose-poetic form within
Filipino literature. He was proclaimed National Artist of the Philippines in Literature on June
23, 1990 by then Philippine President Corazon C. Aquino. For Arcellana, the pride of fiction
is “that it is able to render truth, that is able to present reality”. Arcellana kept alive the
experimental tradition in fiction, and had been most daring in exploring new literary forms to
express the sensibility of the Filipino people. A brilliant craftsman, his works are now an
indispensable part of a tertiary-level-syllabi all over the country. His 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). The next one is Nick
Joaquin. He was born on May 4 1917, at Paco Manila and died last April 29, 2004 at San
Juan. He was a Filipino writer and journalist best known for his short stories and novels in
the English language. He also wrote using the pen name Quijano de Manila. He was
conferred the rank and title of National Artist of the Philippines for Literature. Dramatic poetry
is poetry with lots of action words. Starting as a proofreader for the Philippines Free Press,
Joaquin rose to contributing editor and essayist under the nom de plume “Quijano de Manila”
(“Manila Old-Timer"). The last one is Edith L. Tiempo. She was born on April 22, 1919 and
died last August 21, 2011. She was a poet, fiction writer, teacher and literary critic was a
Filipino writer in the English language whose works are characterized by a remarkable fusion
of style and substance, of craftsmanship and insight.Her poems are intricate verbal
transfigurations of significant experiences as revealed, in two of her much anthologized
pieces, "Halaman" and "Bonsai." As fictionist, Tiempo is as morally profound. Her language
has been marked as "descriptive but unburdened by scrupulous detailing." She is an
influential tradition in Philippine Literature in English. Together with her late husband, writer
and critic Edilberto K. Tiempo, they founded (in 1962) and directed the Silliman National
Writers Workshop in Dumaguete City, which has produced some of the Philippines' best
writers. She was conferred the National Artist Award for Literature in 1999.