Rica Bolipata-Santos' first book award!

To watch acceptance speech on you tube copy and paste: www.youtube.com/watch?v=59IgLMy7jnA

 

Citation: 2007 Madrigal-Gonzalez Best First Book Award

 

And finally, the sixth finalist and this year's winner of the coveted Madrigal-Gonzalez Best FirstBook Award is¦

 

Love, Desire, Children, Etc.: Reflections of aYoung Wife by Rica Bolipata-Santos.

 

Published in 2005 by Milflores Publishing, Inc.,

Bolipata-Santos' first book is a rewarding

collection of thirteen thematically unified essays

that addresses with uncommon candor, grace, and humor

some of life's more mundane realities and mysteries:

love and desire, marriage and children, family and

friends, teaching and writing. The author treads the

uneven terrain of the quotidian with an open compass,

unafraid to confront and scrutinize even her own

intimate fears and insecurities and confusions. Again

and again, in these luminous little personal

narratives, what triumphs is a clear-eyed

self-understanding, which is utterly convincing

because it is earned at the cost of so much

soul-searching and inner struggle. In these

provocative and well-shaped essays, Bolipata-Santos

(following the words of Peter Walsh from Virginia

Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway) has taken hold of fragments

of her public and private life and turned them round,

slowly, in the light, to discover designs that are

finally comprehensible, startling, consoling, and

wise.

 

A deeply celebratory book worthy of the

Madrigal-Gonzales Best First Book Award.

 

Judges:

 

Dr. J. Neil C. Garcia, UP Diliman (Chair)

 

Dr. Jaime An Lim, FEU

 

Prof. Vicente Groyon III, DLSU

 

Done