A luncheon with literary luminaries and essay winners at The Peninsula Manila

Our 13th My Favorite Book Awards with National Book Store and Globe Telecom marked the end of the essay format and the beginning of the Instagram entries.

All in all that’s a total of 676 weekly essays about people’s favorite books! Through the years our winners have run the gamut of professions and writing experiences, from numerous Palanca awardees to never-before-published writers, from teachers to high school and college students, diplomats, poets, retirees, novelists, TV writers, government workers, businesspeople, professionals and homemakers. We’ve had winners who were ill when they wrote intensely personal essays or became ill later and then left us within a year of their winning. One of them was poet and visual artist Sid Hildawa who won during the beginning of our contest. We had one year (2010) when all final eight winners were women; and a year when the youngest winner was 13 years old and the oldest in his 70s.

The books have been varied as well. Our very first grand prize winner (a regional trial court judge) wrote about Webster’s Dictionary and our last one wrote about Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. In between we’ve had Love in the Time of Cholera, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Dekada 70, Atonement, White Oleander, The Solitude of Prime Numbers, The Year of Magical Thinking, and the perennial choices The Little Prince, Tuesdays with Morrie, and The Alchemist.

Our friends and fellow literature lovers who have followed the contest since the beginning will remember us holding the awards at the then newest branch of NBS located at Shangri-La Plaza; we’ve “inaugurated” newer branches since, NBS in Rockwell Power Plant Mall, and last year at the new Glorietta 2.

This year, the awards were hosted by The Manila Peninsula at The Conservatory. We missed some of the Pen executives like general manager Sonja Vodusek and director of public relations Mariano Gartchitorena who were inspecting a site in Bacolod to build houses for typhoon Yolanda victims. All nine Peninsula Hotels (Manila, Hong Kong, Beijing, Chicago, Tokyo, New York, Bangkok, Manila and Beverly Hills) contributed $5 for every night of a guest’s stay from Nov. 22 to Jan. 31 with proceeds going to Hope for the Philippines.

For 2013, first-prize winner is JB Lazarte, who wrote about Joseph Heller’s satirical novel Catch-22  and won P50,000 from NBS; second prize is Radney Ranario, who wrote about Albert Camus’s The Stranger, and won P30,000; third prize winner is Guillermo T. Maglaya Sr. who wrote about various books and poetry, and won P20,000 from NBS. All three also won an LG G-Pro from Globe.

The five honorable-mention winners won P10,000 from NBS and Philippine STAR, and Nokia Lumia 520 from Globe. They are C. Horatius Mosquera (Crossing the Threshold of Hope), Catherine Rose Torres (Snow Leopard, etc.),  Pristine Althea L. de Leon (The End of the Affair),   Mark Gil M. Caparros (Mga Sanaysay sa Lupalop ng Gunita) and Recle E. Vibal (The Graveyard Book).

NBS founder and the woman who taught everybody to love books by making them available in the country, Nanay Socorro Ramos, welcomed everyone to our luncheon. She came with the rest of her NBS family: Tita Virgie Ramos, Presy Ramos, Miguel Ramos, Trina Alindogan and Xandra Ramos-Padilla.

From the STAR came our head of editorial board Isaac Belmonte and Lifestyle editor Millet Mananquil, the lifestyle staff, our YoungStar editor Raymond Ang, and YStyle and Supreme writers. And, of course, our hosts, Supreme editor Tim Yap and YStyle editor Reggie Belmonte.   

Our special speakers this year included National Artist for Literature F. Sionil Jose, Globe Telecom head of corporate affairs Yoly Crisanto, ABS-CBN anchor Karen Davila, STAR columnists Butch Dalisay, Krip Yuson and  Jim Paredes, sports icon Chris Tiu, and Peninsula hotel manager Oliver Dudler.

Every year we have a new batch of awardees and every single time, they remark how absolutely wonderful and starstruck they are to hear speeches from some of the country’s literary luminaries — Sionil Jose, and Palanca Hall of Famers Dalisay and Yuson.

Sionil Jose told an anecdote about an aspiring writer who is offered to choose between wisdom and money. The writer chooses wisdom thinking his writing would lead to money, but it doesn’t and spends the rest of his life being miserable because writing never brings money. “The real world is out there,” Sionil Jose said. “This is all an illusion.”

To which one of the winners quipped when he received his award, “I was so disappointed, Mr. Jose, to know that this award, this gathering is an illusion. I thought it was the reality.”

Butch read poetry and Krip spoke about how in all these years he’s been judging the final entries, there hasn’t been a major winner who wrote about a sports book when there are so many out there.

But I’d like to draw from the speeches of these two gentlemen in awards past where Krip wrote a line for a friend of his who was opening a bookstore — and a good advice for everybody as well: “Spend your life between covers, and live fully with many lovers.”

And Butch who always encourages young writers with his golden words: “I would not have been a writer had I not been a reader. When people ask me what’s the best way to write well, I say, read well.”




Also present at the awards were Esquire editor in chief Erwin Romulo, managing editor Jonty Cruz and features editor Audrey Carpio; and STAR columnists Cheryl Tiu, Toff de Venecia, Marga Buenaventura, and Isaac Belmonte’s daughter Louise Belmonte, who is an intern at the STAR.

As we bid a fond farewell to our long-running essay contest, we welcome the Instagram format where we get to celebrate our favorite books not only in words but in pictures too.