Maria Ressa is the most internationally recognized journalist the Philippines has produced. In 2021 she won the Nobel Peace Prize, shared with the Russian editor Dmitry Muratov, for efforts to safeguard freedom of expression as a precondition for democracy and lasting peace. Three years earlier, Time had named her a Person of the Year, one of a group of journalists it called the Guardians in the war on truth.

Born in Manila in 1963, she moved to the United States as a child after the Marcos government imposed martial law, and returned to the Philippines on a Fulbright after Princeton. She spent nearly two decades as a lead correspondent for CNN, running its Manila and Jakarta bureaus and covering conflict across Southeast Asia, work she drew on for an early book, Seeds of Terror. In 2012 she co-founded the digital newsroom Rappler.

Rappler is why her byline carries weight beyond a single book. After Rodrigo Duterte took office in 2016, it became one of the few Philippine newsrooms to report aggressively on his war on drugs and to document how social platforms were used to flood the public square with propaganda. The reporting drew retaliation: the Committee to Protect Journalists has tracked more than twenty legal cases against Ressa and Rappler since 2017, including a 2020 cyber libel conviction and, in 2025, an acquittal in a foreign-ownership case.

Her 2022 book, How to Stand Up to a Dictator, is part memoir and part manifesto, an argument that democracy dies by a thousand cuts and that the unchecked spread of falsehood online is the slow poison that makes authoritarianism possible. It is the rare book about press freedom written by someone who has paid for the principle in court.

The cost has been personal as well as legal. Studying the online attacks against her, the International Center for Journalists found that at their peak she received an average of roughly ninety hate messages an hour. That she kept publishing through it is the through line of her career, which returns to press freedom, disinformation, and the discipline she sums up in two words, hold the line. She still leads Rappler and now teaches at Columbia University, and for a list of living Filipino authors she is close to a fixed point.

Selected and fact-checked against Hardcover and Open Library.