Kerima Polotan Tuvera - Works and Awards

Works and Awards

Her 1952 short story, (the widely anthologized) The Virgin, won two first prizes: of the Philippines Free Press Literary Awards and of the Palanca Awards. In 1957, she edited an anthology for the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature, which English and Tagalog prize-winning short stories from 1951 to 1952. Her short stories “The Trap” (1956), “The Giants” (1959), “The Tourists” (1960), “The Sounds of Sunday” (1961) and “A Various Season” (1966) all won the first prize of the Palanca Awards.

In 1966, she published Stories, a collection of eleven stories. In 1970, alongside writing the biography of Imelda Marcos, Polotan-Tuvera collected forty-two of her hard-hitting essays during her years as a staff writer of the Philippines Free Press and published them under the title Author's Circle. In 1976, she edited the four-volume Anthology of Don Palanca Memorial Award Winners. In 1977, she published another collection of thirty-five essays, Adventures in a Forgotten Country. In the late 1990s, the University of the Philippines Press republished all of her major works.

The 1961 Stonehill Award was bestowed on Polotan-Tuvera, for her novel The Hand of the Enemy. In 1963, she received the Republic Cultural Heritage Award, an award discontinued in 2003 but was then considered the government’s highest form of recognition for artists at the time. The city of Manila conferred on Polotan-Tuvera its Patnubay ng Sining at Kalinangan Award, in recognition of her contributions to its intellectual and cultural life.