Honoring Lina Espina Moore, Fiction Writer from Cebu, Philippines

One of Cebu’s not­ed fic­tion writ­ers was Lina Espina Moore (1919–2000). I met Lina in my pub­lish­er’s (Glo­ria Rodriguez) office when I was an emerg­ing writer and she was an estab­lished one. She greet­ed me and my moth­er (whom she knew) warm­ly, and Lina went on to men­tor me. When I met her she was already a wid­ow but she enjoyed talk­ing about her mar­ried days with Kip Moore when they lived up in Mr. Data. She said she was most pro­lif­ic there.

Anoth­er thing she said was before she got mar­ried, she used to crank out her sto­ries in order to make mon­ey to pay for school reg­is­tra­tion fees of her young relatives.
Lina was born in Tole­do, Cebu, the fifth child and sec­ond daugh­ter of Yrinea Reg­n­er and Gerun­dio Espina. She attend­ed Cebu Cen­tral Col­lege, the Cebu Inter­me­di­ate High School, South­ern Col­leges and the FEU before becom­ing a cub reporter for the Mani­la Times.

Lina belonged to the post Sec­ond World War gen­er­a­tion of Fil­ipino writ­ers who con­tributed much to the vital­i­ty of Philip­pine Lit­er­a­ture in Eng­lish. She wrote nov­els, short sto­ries, essays, and poet­ry in Cebuano and in Eng­lish. An out­stand­ing fic­tion­ist, her nov­els and sto­ries writ­ten in her native Cebuano have appeared in Bisaya mag­a­zine. She wrote three nov­els in Eng­lish: Heart of the Lotus (1970); A Lion in the House (1980), and The Hon­ey, the Locusts (1992). Her short sto­ries are found in two col­lec­tions: Cuen­tos (1985), and Choice (1995).
Some her sto­ries have been trans­lat­ed into Japan­ese, Man­darin, Mahasa, Ger­man, and Taga­log. The for­mer Chair Per­son of the Cebu Chap­ter of PEN, she edit­ed Cebuano Har­vest (1991). For her dis­tin­guished ser­vice, she has received many awards, among them the Gawad Pam­pansang Algad ni Bal­ag­tas in 1992 and the SEAWRITE Award in 1989. She also edit­ed the short sto­ries of anoth­er Cebua­na writer, The Sto­ries of Estrel­la Alfon.

Lina Espina-Moore was mar­ried for 17 years to C.S. (Kip) Moore, an Amer­i­can lum­ber com­pa­ny exec­u­tive. They lived in Mt. Data, Moun­tain Province, where she wrote exten­sive­ly on the life an times of the trib­al minori­ties of the Cen­tral Cordilleras. She was wid­owed in 1976. She resided in Ala­bang, Metro Mani­la, but moved to her home­town Cebu to be with her son and his fam­i­ly. She passed away in her beloved Cebu.

The awards she received include: Out­stand­ing Achieve­ment in the Field of Eng­lish Lit­er­a­ture from the Province of Cebu (1975), Pan Pacif­ic South­east Asian Asso­ci­a­tion Award in the Field of the Eng­lish Nov­el (1975), Mag­susu­lat Award for Exem­plary Con­tri­bu­tion to Lit­er­a­ture in Cebuano (1987), and the much-esteemed Thai­land South­east Asian Write Award pre­sent­ed by HRH Crown Prince Vaji­ra­longko­rn for her nov­el Heart of the Lotus in 1989. In 1992 she received both the Women in Trav­el Award in the Field of Lit­er­a­ture and the Lit­er­ary Award from the Mar­i­ano F. Manguer­ra Foundation.

The pic­tures show Lina, Lina with my moth­er (Con­cep­cion Cuen­co Manguer­ra) and me in our Cebu veran­dah, Lina and me, some of Lina’s books.

Tags: Cebu, Cebuano, lit­er­a­ture, nov­el­ist, writer, author, Fil­ip­ina, fic­tion writer

Source: https://cbrainard.blogspot.com/…/in-honor-of-filipino-filip…