Patricia Evangelista wrote one of the defining works of Philippine nonfiction this decade. Some People Need Killing (2023) was named one of the ten best books of the year by The New York Times and the year's best nonfiction by Time, and in 2024 it won the New York Public Library's Helen Bernstein Award for its account of the killings carried out under President Rodrigo Duterte.

She came up in broadcast and multimedia news in Manila, and first drew notice at nineteen, when she won the London International Public Speaking Championship with a speech about Filipino identity. A third-generation journalist, she spent years covering disaster and conflict, including the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan, before the drug war became her subject. For roughly six years she reported for Rappler, the independent newsroom co-founded by Maria Ressa, documenting police and vigilante killings and interviewing the bereaved alongside the men who carried them out.

Her book is the record of that work, a memoir of murder in her own country that reads as literary journalism refusing the comfort of distance. It anatomizes the language of state violence, the euphemisms like tokhang and nanlaban that let a country talk itself into killing, and takes its title from a killer's own justification, which Evangelista sets against Duterte's rhetoric.

What sets her apart, she told NPR, is a refusal to look away: her job, she said, was to stand over the body on the ground and ask whether it had to happen, and the answer was always that someone behind the barrel of a gun had said yes. That moral clarity, built on years of reporting, is why the book landed as hard as it did, and why it was also longlisted for the Women's Prize for Non-Fiction and named a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize.

The work has only grown more urgent. In 2025, when the International Criminal Court took Duterte into custody on charges of crimes against humanity, Some People Need Killing read less like history than like testimony. For a list of living Filipino authors whose work confronts power, Evangelista's account of impunity is among the most necessary.

Selected and fact-checked against Hardcover and Open Library.