Eric Gamalinda is a poet and novelist whose work has spent four decades turning Philippine history, memory, and exile into literature. Born in Manila in 1956, he came up as an investigative journalist during the Marcos dictatorship before immigrating to the United States in 1993, and his fiction belongs to the generation of writers who tried to make sense of what martial law had done to the country. His novel The Empire of Memory (1992) is set squarely in the rise and fall of the Marcos regime, and his reporting, on politics and on rock music, had already trained him to watch power closely and to distrust official versions of events.

His honors sit on both sides of the line between poetry and fiction. His poetry collection Zero Gravity (1999) won the Asian American Literary Award, and his novel My Sad Republic took the Philippine Centennial Literary Prize, one of two books that earned him the Philippine National Book Award. He has also won Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards across poetry, fiction, and the essay, a reminder that his reputation was made in Manila long before American readers found him.

The range is the point. Across five novels, three books of poems, and collections of short fiction, Gamalinda moves between the historical and the surreal, the documentary and the dreamed. His most recent novel, The Descartes Highlands (2014), his first published in the United States, was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize and binds together three men on three continents joined by a single act of fertility and loss. Earlier books like Planet Waves and Confessions of a Volcano established the blend of political history and magic that critics have called his signature.

He has built that body of work while teaching and mentoring. He teaches at Columbia University's Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, once ran the publications program at the Asian American Writers' Workshop, and has held residencies from MacDowell to the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center, with support from the New York Foundation for the Arts. He has lived in New York since the early 1990s.

In interviews he keeps returning to the same preoccupations: history and forgetting, exile, colonialism, and the strangeness underneath ordinary Philippine life. For a list of living Filipino authors, Gamalinda is one of the most decorated and least categorizable, a writer equally at home in a poem and a novel, and equally drawn to the country he left and the one he can never quite leave behind.

Selected and fact-checked against Hardcover and Open Library.