To Be Free

“The Metamorphosis of a Novel” is the title of a dissertation on Daughters of Time, serialized in a magazine ten years ago, and its present form under the title To Be Free. In the revisions of the novel Edilberto K. Tiempo showed the same meticulous attention he gave to the reworking of his short story collection (nine of the fourteen stories in A Stream at Dalton Pass appear in anthologies) whose publication in 1970 “confirms his position among the country’s leading fictionists,” comments Critic Francisco Arcellana, “along with Joaquin, Gonzalez, and Bienvenido N. Santos.” Tiempo worked on the revisions of the two books simultaneously. He has been working on other published stories for another collection.

His first novel, Cry Slaughter, published in London in hard cover and with several Avon paperback printings, has translations in French, German, Spanish, Dutch, Danish, and Norwegian. His second, More Than Conquerors, won first prize for the novel in the Golden Jubilee literary contest of the University of the Philippines. They Called Us Outlaws, which he wrote for the USAFFE, was used by the American prosecution in the trial of Japanese war criminals.

He received a bachelor’s degree from Silliman University (he is presently dean of its Graduate School after serving as chairman of the English Department for a number of years), a M. F. A. from the University of Iowa, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Denver. He taught fiction and literary criticism for four years as an exchange professor in two American schools. He and his wife, Edith, a prize-winning poet and fiction writer, have collaborated on several textbooks; they also direct the Silliman Writers Workshop which has received subsidies from the Asia Foundation and the Ford Foundation, and which is now supported by a permanent endowment from the Agency for Christian Literature Development.

A holder of Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships in creative writing, Tiempo has just received an appointment as a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore where he will work on the fiction of Southeast Asia.