Gregorio Brillantes, one of the legendary editors of the Philippines Free Press and the author of the short story collections, The Distance to Andromeda and Other Stories and The Apollo Centennial, has passed away today due to complications from pneumonia, according to his family. He was 92.
Considered a landmark “Catholic Writer,” Brillantes began his career when he was at the Ateneo de Manila University, where he edited the Ateneo Quarterly, together with Emmanuel Torres and Leonidas Benesa, who both became critically acclaimed poets. But it wasn’t until 1952 that Brillantes published his first short story in a national publication, the Philippines Free Press.
Many of his collected short stories were published in the Free Press, where he eventually joined the staff in 1961 and worked alongside contemporaries Nick Joaquin, Kerima Polotan, and Jose F. Lacaba. This also sharpened his eye for journalism, resulting in numerous nonfiction works. Alongside his fiction collections, he has also produced essay collections such as Looking for Rizal in Madrid, a book that transcends the genre of travel literature, Chronicles of Interesting Times, a book of observations about the state of the nation and its players, and The Cardinal’s Sins, the General’s Cross, the Martyr’s Testimony and Other Affirmations, which collects writings from journals such as the Free Press, Philippines Leader, National Mid-Week, and Philippine Graphic.
He published his first short story collection, The Distance to Andromeda and Other Stories, in 1960. The book came with an introduction by NVM Gonzalez, who called it “Perhaps our most firmly Catholic book of fiction.” The book was considered one of the “ten most significant books published in the Philippines in the last 50 years” by critics.
Many of Brillantes’ fiction were inspired by his native Camiling, Tarlac, anchored by, as he once described, “the acacia trees, the house of his boyhood, the drugstore, the magazines in the cabinet, and the sense, gradually growing, in the boardinghouse where he first lived in the city, of time passing.” He has been called the “godfather of Philippine speculative fiction,” as some of his short stories would contain elements of science fiction and fantasy, such as the dystopian “The Apollo Centennial” and the future-looking “On a Clear Day in November, Shortly Before the Millennium.”
Some of his award-winning stories include “Climate of Disaster, Season of Disgrace,” “Faith, Love, Time, and Dr. Lazaro,” and “The Flood in Tarlac.” He was inducted into the Hall of Fame of the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards in Literature Hall of Fame.
He was also a recipient of lifetime achievement awards such as the Gawad CCP Para sa Sining from the Cultural Center of the Philippines and the Gawad Pambansang Alagad ni Balagtas from the writers’ union of the Philippines, UMPIL. He also received the EWCAAP (East-West Center Alumni Association of the Philippines) Most Outstanding Alumna Recognition award and the Tanghal ng Lahi Award from Ateneo De Manila University. He was also a founding member of the Philippine Chapter of International Pen.
In 2023, the Ateneo de Manila University Press published an omnibus of his short story collections, edited by Jonathan Chua, a landmark collection that proves Brillantes’ invaluable contribution to Philippine literature. In her introduction, Reine Arcache Melvin wrote, “Gregorio Brillantes’ writing is precise, a scalpel, but the precision is descriptive. His stories capture all that is most imprecise in the human heart — the longings, the losses, the chaos, and the contradictions. His beautiful, controlled prose is a net to capture the unspeakable: he writes fiction with the soul of a poet, using language to point to the silences and mysteries that can only be bracketed by words.”
Brillantes’s stories were given life by his characters — faltering, hoping, and dying, inhabiting forms of living, love, and loneliness, scarred by upheavals that have also marked their writers’ life, both as a human and a Filipino.
In his postscript to the 1999 edition of The Distance to Andromeda and Other Stories, Brillantes still evokes the Camiling of his boyhood, encapsulating the ethos of many of his works. Here, he encouraged us to go on a walk around the plaza, the vanished glorieta, and lit lampposts “even if the implacable future has come,” he wrote. “You may still retrieve some stories, at least, from departed times and lost places. Or memories of stories about how they were written and why, for heaven’s sake, they would only reflect and not change a world.”
He is survived by his wife, Lourdes Castrillo Brillantes, and his three daughters Patricia Brillantes-Silvestre, Cecilia Brillantes-Conlu, and Alicia Brillantes-Flores, and his granddaughters Rebecca, Isabella, and Katerina.
