Filipino

playwrights

ARTS 9
JORIZ NICCOLO
FONTELARA
 FRANCISCO
ARCELLENA

 Francisco "Franz" Arcellana was a Filipino

writer, poet, essayist, critic, journalist and
teacher. He was born on September 6, 1916.
Arcellana already had ambitions of
becoming a writer early in his childhood. His
actual writing, however, started when he
became a member of The Torres Torch
Organization during his high school years.
Arcellana continued writing in various school
papers at the University of the Philippines
Diliman. Later on he received a Rockefeller
Grant and became a fellow in Creative
Writing at the University of Iowa and at the
Breadloaf Writers' Conference from 1956–
1957.
 He is considered an important progenitor of the
modern Filipino short story in English. Arcellana
pioneered the development of the short story as
a lyrical prose-poetic form within Filipino
literature. His works are now often taught in
tertiary-level-syllabi in the Philippines. Many of his
works were translated into Tagalog, Malaysian,
Russian, Italian, and German. Arcellana won 2nd
place in the 1951 Don Carlos Palanca Memorial
Awards for Literature, with his short story, "The
Flowers of May." Fourteen of his short stories were
also included in Jose Garcia Villa's Honor Roll
from 1928 to 1939. His major achievements
included the first award in art criticism from the
Art Association of the Philippines in 1954, the
Patnubay ng Sining at Kalinangan award from
the city government of Manila in 1981, and the
Gawad Pambansang Alagad ni Balagtas for
English fiction from the Unyon ng mga Manunulat
sa Pilipino (UMPIL) in 1988.

 The University of the Philippines conferred upon

Arcellana a doctorate in humane letters, honoris
causa in 1989. Francisco Arcellana was
proclaimed National Artist of the Philippines in
Literature on 23, 1990 by then Philippine President
Corazon C. Aquino.
 FRANCISCO
BALAGTAS
 Francisco Baltazar also known as Francisco
Balagtas, was a prominent Filipino poet,
and is widely considered one of the
greatest Filipino literary laureates for his
impact on Filipino literature. The famous
epic, Florante at Laura, is regarded as his
defining work.

 The name "Baltazar", sometimes

misconstrued as a pen name, was a legal
surname Balagtas adopted after the 1849
edict of Governor-General Narciso
Claveria y Zaldua, which mandated that
the native population adopt standard
Spanish surnames instead of native ones.
His trainer is Jose Dela Cruz, also called
Huseng Sisiw.
 Guillermo
Gómez Rivera
 Guillermo Gómez Rivera is a Spanish Filipino
multilingual author, historian, educator and
linguistic scholar whose lifelong work has been
devoted to the often controversial movement to
preserve Spanish culture as an important
element of the Filipino identity.

 He is the most senior academic director of the

Academia Filipina de la Lengua Española of the
Real Academia Española.[In 1975, he was
awarded the Premio Zóbel, the Philippines'
highest literary honor bestowed on the best
works in Spanish. Due to his expertise in the
Spanish language as well as his knowledge of
various Philippine languages, including
Cebuano, Hiligaynon, Tagalog and Chabacano,
he was appointed secretary of the Commission
on the Filipino Language Committee of the
Philippine Constitutional Convention (1971–73).
 As a Spanish professor at Adamson University he
authored textbooks on Spanish grammar,
speech and composition while working for San
Miguel Corporation, a food conglomerate. He
used his academic position to try to influence
national debates on the question of whether or
not Spanish should be retained as a compulsory
subject in Philippine high schools and universities,
a battle that many pro-Spanish advocates
believe they had lost with the passage of the
1987 Constitution but which some Hispanists say
started with the 1973 Constitution.

 Having done extensive research on Spanish

dances, including flamenco and Sevillanas, he
formed a dance school to teach students of all
ages an appreciation of Spanish culture through
the dance art. He traveled to Spain to improve
his skills, learning from Spanish masters of these
dance forms. He is considered a maestro de
flamenco in the Philippines.

 In an hour-long broadcast devoted to Asia on

September 24, 2013, Spanish Radio and
Television Corp. (RTVE) described Gómez Rivera
as a "writer, journalist, historian...[who] has
tracked incessantly Hispanic legacy in the
Philippines and has recovered part of an
endangered folklore. During the same
broadcast, RTVE played songs from an LP of rare
Filipino compositions in Spanish that Gómez
Rivera recorded in 1960 and reissued in 2006
after it had been digitally remastered.