GLENN DIAZ's first novel The Quiet Ones (Ateneo Press) won the 2017 Palanca Grand Prize and the Philippine National Book Award and the Madrigal Gonzales First Book Award. "Highly discursive and meandering, it was able to grip the reader's attention to diverse consciousness that are world-weary yet humorous. It is a timely work that brings to our attention the cost of our keeping afloat in global dreams that are not quite our own, and unquiet still." Luna Sicat Cleto (Citation for the National Book Award) and "… a tour de force, an awesome game of fictional juggling, mastering multiple narratives that cascade, skim and collide, leaving the reader breathless." Rica Bolipata Santos (Citation for the Madrigal Gonzales First Book Award)

His second novel, Yñiga (Ateneo Press), is Winner of Best Novel in English, 41st Philippine National Book Awards 2023. In 2020, Yñiga was shortlisted for the Novel Prize (Fitzcarraldo/New Directions/Giramondo), selected from over 1500 entries worldwide. The first chapter of Yñiga was published in Johannesburg Review of Books and an extract in The Oxonian Review.

In Spring 2026, Yñiga will be published in the UK with Tilted Axis Press and in North America with Coffee House Press, and this will be his first book to be published outside of the Philippines.

Yñiga Calinauan's quiet life in a suburb of Manila is upended when a retired army general wanted for the murder of peasants and activists is captured across the street from her house. Days later the neighborhood is burned to the ground in what some say is retaliation. With nowhere to go, she returns to the small fishing town where she grew up and now hopes to regain the quiet life she has lost. But soon she discovers that the terror she thought she had escaped in the city is right on her trail, and she must face the "forest of history" that has long haunted her family. The author says: "Yñiga is about the routine, deep-rooted violence of state terror but also the possibility of resistance, a narrative that I feel has many iterations the world over."

Glenn Diaz is a recipient of fellowships and residencies in Bangalore, New York, and Jakarta, among others. Born and raised in Manila, he holds a PhD from the University of Adelaide. He lives in Quezon City.

"Diaz, like all great novelists of history, knows that to disappear—and to be disappeared—is a political question as much as an existential one. This moving, remarkable novel—as dense, meditative and engrossing as the forests its characters are haunted by, and as dryly funny as the jokes we tell ourselves to survive—is as much a visceral, unforgettable journey into one woman's fraught familial legacy of disappearance and resistance, as well as a deeply poignant meditation on nation-building itself—and its own fraught familial legacy of disappearance, and resistance." Elaine Castillo, author of America Is Not the Heart and How to Read Now

"As one of the country's most engaging and versatile storytellers, Glenn Diaz amazes as no other can. Between the interlocking scenes of beauty and horror runs a magic that only Diaz can create out of thin air, subtle in some places, maniacal in others, yet ever so mindful that the author must be in full control of the story. The way the author grabs hold of the political question and allows it to rankle and grow bitter slowly in the heart of the reader is a marvel of political storytelling. To Diaz, disappearances are not simple crimes against humanity, but they are, in a variety of subtle ways, a means to be found." Judges' citation for 41st Philippine National Book Awards

ESSAYS

New York Times, Pandemic Pantries in the Streets

CNN Philippines, What Arundhati Roy Taught Me About Fiction "From Roy I thus learned that fiction is, first and foremost, about alertness, both to the smallest scurryings of language and the broadest infrastructures that dictate how lives are lived. Fiction is about the Small Things because most of the time they betray the Big Things; often they are one and the same."

INTERVIEWS

CNN Philippines, Glenn Diaz Doesn't Have a Problem with Being Too Political "As a Filipino writer, my main basis is historical consciousness, precisely because our contemporary lives are shaped so drastically by history."

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