News: Dominic Sy Selected for KK / AdMU Press First Book Prize

April 09, 2019

We are pleased to announce that A Natural History of Empire by Dominic Sy was selected as the winner of the Kritika Kultura / Ateneo de Manila University Press First Book Prize. Sy’s book was chosen from among a total of 22 entries.

Of the manuscript, award-winning novelist and the competition’s inaugural judge Gina Apostol writes: “This collection redresses the innumerable slights perpetrated on Philippine history—whether by dictators, conquistadors, or that other killer, time—by touching directly on its material fabric, restitching it: documents, neglected episodes, personal memory. Above all, like the best works of our bedeviled times, it speaks to a future as it looks back at the past, hoping not for resurrection, but revolution.”

Sy teaches composition and literature at the Department of English and Comparative Literature in University of the Philippines Diliman. He received 2nd prize for the short story in the 2012 Amelia Lapena Bonifacio Literary Contest, and won 3rd place at the inaugural F. Sionil Jose Young Writers Award in 2015. He was a fellow at the 12th Ateneo National Writers Workshop in 2014, the 2015 UST National Writers’ Workshop, and the 2016 Iligan National Writers Workshop. 

A Natural History of Empire is forthcoming from Ateneo de Manila University Press.


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