Mina V. Esguerra has done as much as any single author to build a market for Filipino romance written in English, both as a prolific novelist and as the organizer of the community around her. Based in Manila, she writes contemporary romance, around twenty-five books of it, about young professionals navigating careers, families, and love in recognizably Filipino settings, and she holds degrees from the Ateneo de Manila and the University of the Philippines.

She started in traditional publishing, with the 2009 debut My Imaginary Ex, then moved early to self-publishing, an unusual path in the Philippine market at the time, and reached readers in dozens of countries, an early proof that the audience was there. Her books, among them Fairy Tale Fail, That Kind of Guy, and the Chic Manila series, won her back-to-back Filipino Readers' Choice Awards in 2012 and 2013.

Her largest contribution may be the community she built. In 2013 she founded #romanceclass, which began as a free online class on writing a romance novella in a month and grew into a network of Filipino authors writing romance in English, with hundreds of participants and around a hundred published books read in more than fifty countries. She has called it the class she wished she had taken.

The community became known for something unusual: live reading events, where actors perform kilig, the Filipino word for a romantic thrill, from members' books before an audience. Esguerra has paired the craft mentorship with advocacy, working on copyright and intellectual property so that independent Filipino authors can hold on to what they make.

Her recurring subjects are contemporary Filipino romance and the young professionals who live it, but her real subject may be the field itself, the conviction that there should be more Filipino romance and more Filipino writers making it. For a list of living Filipino authors, Esguerra stands a little apart, as much a builder of a literature as a writer of one, and one of the reasons Filipino romance in English has a shelf at all.

Selected and fact-checked against Hardcover and Open Library.