Talk:1956 Palanca Awards
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For her short stories, Kerima Polotan, has won many prestigious literary awards: four first prizes and two second prizes from the Carlos Palanca Memorial and a first prize from the Philippines Free Press. On the accusation that she patterns her fiction after true-to-life incidents, Kerima Polotan says: "The art of fiction is a prism that the writer can use to refract human experience. That one can write about it brings him, if not deeper understanding, some kind of peace. In other words, the writer is first a human being, before he is anything else, prone, like much of mankind, to fits of joy and pain. What happens to those around him-and, yes, to him-is legitimate material, but only if he is able to illumine it with a special insight." Author's Choice, first published in 1972, is one of Kerima Polotan's collection of essays. According to Armando Manalo, "as fine a short story writer as Miss Poloton is, she is ten times a better journalist. Among her peers in the widely-practiced art, she is in a class by herself. Her art at its acid best is classical in finish and execution. She is the Lucrezia Borgia of Philippine Letters." Kerima Polotan has won the Stonehill Award for her novel The Hand of the Enemy, the Carlos Palanca Memorial and Philippines Free Press awards for several short stories, the Republic Heritage Award for Literature, and the Asia Magazine Award for Fiction. She was on the staff of the Free Press for many years, and later edited Focus Philippines and the Evening Post. Her stories have been compiled under the title Stories, and her essays under Author's Choice and Adventures in a Forgotten Country.
The Hand of the Enemy won the 1961 Stonehill Award for Filipino Novel in English. In this novel, Kerima Polotan probes into the sensibility of the middle-class, and the intellectual elite. With her technical competence and fluent writing, Polotan follows her heroine as she agonizes through her marriage, the unfaithfulness of her husband, and the sense that life has defeated her. These personal concerns are linked to the climate of social and political corruption particularly in the city due to society's failure to read the lessons of history. Yet Polotan, although she shows her character to be a victim (not so much of society circumstances as of her own failure of will and her rather romantic perceptions and confused set of priorities), recognizes in her life and career that it is essential for a woman to survive and for a woman writer to be able to write and continue writing.
