In Honor of Filipino American Writer, Ligaya Victorio Fruto

 

In Honor of Filipino American Writer, Ligaya Victorio Fruto who forged the way for other Filipino and Filam writers:

 

LIGAYA VICTORIO FRUTO, whose story "The Fan" is part of the classic collection FICTION BY FILIPINOS IN AMERICA

BORN AND raised in the Philippines, Ligaya Victorio Fruto was trained as a teacher at the Philippine Normal School. While still in her teens, she began teaching and at the same time wrote stories which were published in leading national publications. Because she taught in Baguio, her early stories were mostly about the people of the mountain region.

Ligaya later worked for the pre-war Tribune, forerunner of the Manila Times. Of her contemporaries, Ligaya is one of the few who have not deviated from writing as her main profession. She has covered the field of journalism and creative writing in the Philippines and her adopted country, the U.S., in a range so wide it would be hard to contest. She has written two books, Yesterday and Other Stories and One Rainbow for the Duration, proceeds of which were donated to Philippine charities.

She was married early but was widowed during the Japanese Occupation of the Philippines. She worked for the Philippine Foreign Service; it was in Honolulu that she met and married Larry Fruto, a Filipino, who, as a very young man, went to Hawaii on his own and finished his engineering education there. Her only son by her first marriage, Ramon V. Reyes, lives in the U.S. with his wife and children. Ligaya lived in Honolulu.

Read also:

Philippine Literature: Filipino and Filipino American Writers 

Bienvenido N. Santos - Cecilia Brainard Remembers

N.V.M. Gonzalez - In Honor of Filipino American Writer

Linda Ty-Casper - In Honor of Filipino Writer

Paulino Lim Jr - In Honor of Filipino American Writer

Gloria F. Rodriguez - Editor, Publisher