Isabel Yap writes speculative fiction that folds Philippine folklore into contemporary life, where the monstrous and the tender share a page. Born and raised in Manila, she studied at the Ateneo de Manila before moving to the United States, took a degree at Santa Clara University and later an MBA at Harvard, and has built her writing life alongside a career in tech. In 2013 she attended the Clarion Writers Workshop, a finishing school for many of the field's new voices, and has since served the foundation behind it.

Her debut collection, Never Have I Ever: Stories (Small Beer Press, 2021), gathers spells and urban legends, immigrant tales and outright horror, moving from science fiction to fairy tale to ghost story without losing its center. Its stories set creatures from Philippine myth loose in modern settings, the shape-shifting aswang, the self-severing manananggal, alongside grief, friendship, queerness, and the ache of diaspora, in a prose one critic called intimate, grotesque, and beautiful at once.

The collection was widely honored. It won the 2022 British Fantasy Award for Best Collection and the Ladies of Horror Fiction Award, and it was a finalist for the World Fantasy, Locus, Ignyte, and Crawford awards, as well as a New York Public Library best book of the year, a rare run of recognition for a debut and a sign of how quickly the field embraced her.

Her short fiction reaches back more than a decade. Stories like A Cup of Salt Tears, published on Tor.com in 2014, How to Swallow the Moon, and Have You Heard the One About Anamaria Marquez have appeared in leading magazines and year's-best anthologies, several drawing directly on the folklore she grew up with. She has spoken about wanting to write the aswang not as exotic horror but as something half-remembered from childhood.

Her recurring subjects are Filipino mythology, girlhood and its dangers, monstrosity, and queerness, handled with a seriousness that treats genre as a way toward feeling rather than away from it. For a list of living Filipino authors, Yap is the one most likely to make folklore feel like the truest realism, carrying Philippine monsters into the heart of English-language speculative fiction.

Selected and fact-checked against Hardcover and Open Library.