Gregorio C. Brillantes, from Camiling to Andromeda

The fiction of Gregorio C. Brillantes moved between the familiar and the infinite. From the streets and quiet households of his native Camiling, Tarlac, his stories opened onto questions of faith, mortality, memory and humanity’s place in an immense universe. In his hands, the ordinary moment could become an encounter with mystery.

Brillantes was posthumously declared National Artist for literature in September 2026. He joined Gabriel “Gabby” Formoso in the field of architecture and allied arts; Rafael “Nonoy” Froilan in dance; Maria Beatriz “Patis” Tesoro in design; Armando “Bing” Lao in film and broadcast arts (posthumous); Nicanor G. Tiongson in literature; Alfredo S. Buenaventura in music; Teodoro L. Hilado in theater (posthumous); and Imelda Cajipe-Endaya and Nunelucio M. Alvarado in visual arts.

Born on 18 December 1932, Brillantes grew up in Camiling, the son of a schoolteacher and a drugstore owner. The town would become a recurring presence in his fiction—not merely as a setting, but as a landscape of memory through which he examined Filipino life before, during, and after the Second World War.

He moved to Manila in 1948 and studied literature at the Ateneo de Manila, where he began writing for campus publications. Over the next five decades, he produced nearly 50 short stories and hundreds of literary, journalistic and polemical essays.

Two of his best-known stories, “The Distance to Andromeda” and “Faith, Love, Time and Dr. Lazaro,” were written before he turned 30. The first follows a boy returning home after watching an apocalyptic film, overwhelmed by the vastness of the universe and his own apparent insignificance. The second centers on a country doctor confronting mortality after attending to a dying child. Both reveal Brillantes’s ability to locate profound spiritual and philosophical questions within everyday experience.

Although frequently described as a Catholic writer, Brillantes resisted being confined to a single mode. His fiction ranged from realism to satire, speculative fiction, and formal experimentation. “The Apollo Centennial,” for instance, imagined a future Philippines while examining authoritarianism, technological ambition and national identity.

His later stories became increasingly attentive to the country’s political unrest, social inequality and the moral uncertainties of the middle class. Yet he rarely reduced fiction to argument. His works remained subtle and open-ended, allowing accumulated details, silences and gestures to carry their emotional and political weight.

Brillantes also had a long career in journalism and publishing. He worked as a writer and editor for the Philippine Free Press, Asia-Philippines Leader, Sunburst, Focus Philippines, Manila Review, Veritas, National Midweek, and Philippine Graphic. His essays addressed literature, language, religion, politics and popular culture with intellectual rigor and wit.

His stories have been translated into several languages and included in major anthologies of Philippine literature. His honors included the Gawad CCP para sa Sining, the Gawad Pambansang Alagad ni Balagtas and induction into the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature Hall of Fame. The Collected Stories of Gregorio C. Brillantes, published by the Ateneo de Manila University Press in 2023, gathered works bearing witness to half a century of postwar Philippine life.

Brillantes died on 26 September 2025, at 92. He left a body of fiction that leads readers from provincial streets to distant stars, illuminating the fragile, restless, and enduring mystery of being human.