KRIPOTKIN By Alfred A. Yuson November 24, 2008 12:00 AM Philippine Star www.philstar.net Those fateful three days and nights in Hong Kong before the previous weekend were alternately relaxing and suspenseful, the latter only a bit. Good thing I’ve had minimal relations with luck of late, so that hoping for a big turn was hardly in my agenda. When the shortlist for the Man Asian Prize for the novel was announced on Oct. 22, it started a dizzying ride — from pleasant surprise to pride of place, seeing as how it meant honor not really for oneself alone, but for country. International literary agents and at least one notable publisher were quick to initiate communications, asking for a copy of the manuscript. It was just as buddy Butch Dalisay recounted when he gained the finals in the contest’s first edition last year. He levitated for weeks, all the way to the ceremonial awards dinner in Hong Kong. Same here. Congrats were rife, and the honor was doubled because there was a fellow Pino...

From the Daily Tribune Chuck Syjuco was a student of mine at the Ateneo and I am justly proud to have taught him. His novel has won the Palanca Grand Prize for the Novel and -- along with the novel of Krip Yuson -- has been shortlisted for the Man Asia Award for the Novel. The last time I saw him was in Starbucks Greenwich Village in New York in 2001. I was returning to the Philippines after my graduate studies in the States; he was starting his. I gave him a short tour of the village and the bookstores, and we parted ways. Now he is on the way up, up, up. Hurray! *** All his life, Miguel Syjuco has dreamt of winning a Palanca Award. And now, the Montreal, Canada-based expatriate Filipino writer has fulfilled his dream and won the much coveted grand prize in the competition’s novel category. His entry was an intricately structured novel which he tried to finish for three years while working full-time as copy editor of Quebec’s largest newspaper, The Montreal Gazette. In an interview be...