Rin Chupeco has spent a decade placing Filipino folklore on the same shelf as the Western fairy tale. Their publisher's biography describes a nonbinary Chinese Filipino writer, who uses the pronouns they and them, worked once as a graphic designer and technical writer, and now writes fiction full time from Manila, where they live with their partner and two children.

The purpose is explicit in their own account of it. In a 2020 interview they said they wanted Filipino myth, like the mountain goddess Maria Makiling, to stand on equal footing with the fairy tales children everywhere grow up reading. Wicked As You Wish combines legends, myths, fairy tales, and classic children's literature from Oz to Neverland into a single story, which is the project in miniature.

The catalog is wide. It runs from the Japanese-horror of The Girl from the Well and its sequel, through the necromancy of the Bone Witch trilogy, begun in 2017, and the fairy-tale mashup of the A Hundred Names for Magic series, to the adult gothic of Silver Under Nightfall. Earlier, the duology that began with The Never-Tilting World split a single planet between twin sisters and two impossible climates. In conversation with the Los Angeles Public Library, Chupeco noted how often the weather and the world itself become the antagonist in their books, a habit they tie to growing up in a country shaped by storms.

Their 2022 novel, The Sacrifice, is set on a cursed Philippine island and follows a nonbinary protagonist, using a horror frame to take on colonialism and the violence of being misread. Across the books the recurring concerns hold steady: folklore as inheritance, the monstrous made sympathetic, and queer and nonbinary characters placed at the center of the story rather than its edges. The choice to work in horror, a genre long treated as lesser, is part of the argument.

Chupeco has built that record without depending on a single breakout title, publishing steadily across young-adult and adult fantasy and horror for a decade, work that appears from major houses and turns up regularly on lists of Filipino speculative fiction. For a list of living Filipino authors widening what Philippine stories can be on the international shelf, they are a deserving entry.

Selected and fact-checked against Hardcover and Open Library.