About Me
As a child, I dreamed of growing up to be a hitman (I read The Godfather at an impressionable age), a vampire (likewise Stephen King and Anne Rice books), or a mystic (I went to a Catholic school). Because the probability of realising those aspirations were practically nil, I became (arguably) the next best thing: a writer.
Born in the Philippines, I grew up sheltered in the suburbs of the capital. My various incarnations have included: being an assistant editor for Phoenix-Sibs (a textbook publishing house in Manila); a staff writer for Filipinas magazine (a former national Filipino-American magazine based in the San Francisco Bay Area); a bumbling barperson/server/kitchen assistant in a Kent English pub; a fully clothed life drawing model; and an awkward admin temp in several office gigs around Edinburgh, including one where I sorted files in a deep underground vault that was reputedly haunted by seventeenth-century ghosts. That experience, along with the atmospheric environment, reignited my fascination with folk tales, horror, witchcraft, and magic.
In 2020, in the middle of a global pandemic (and against all odds…at least, in my opinion), my debut novel What It Means to Be Malaya was published in the Philippines by Bughaw, an imprint of Ateneo de Manila University Press. Following that, my short stories appeared on online literary journals and in a couple of anthologies. Then, my story, Dwende (published as Mae Emmily Rhodes), received an honourable mention in the Storyshares 2022 Story of the Year Contest. About a year later, the US-based inclusive indie Sword & Kettle Press published my mini-chapbook Split Bamboo as part of their New Cosmologies series. Thanks to the people who’ve taken a gamble on my writing, I began to feel like a bona fide author.
In November 2024, I was awarded a Developing Your Creative Practice (DYCP) grant by Arts Council England. The grant is for my project Hauntings from My Homeland, an exploration of Philippine myths and Filipino immigrants through a collection of short stories.
At present, I’m a freelance writer based in Derbyshire.
