“The heart of the theater is the play itself, how it dramatizes life to make it meaningful entertainment. To achieve depth and universality, the playwright must subject himself to intense critique, to know human character and behavior, and finally to construct art from the most mundane of human experience.”

Filipino writer

Francisco Sionil José was a Filipino writer, born in 1924 and died in 2022. He was widely read in English and was named a National Artist of the Philippines for Literature in 2001. His novels and short stories examine the social roots of class conflict and colonialism in Filipino society. Written in English, his work was translated into 28 languages, and he was often spoken of as a leading Filipino contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature.