Trilohiya ng Mga Bilang
2023
Ateneo de Manila University Press
About the author:
Edgar Calabia Samar is a Filipino author of several award-winning works. His first novel, Walong
Diwata ng Pagkahulog, received the 2005 NCCA Writer’s Prize, and its English translation, Eight
Muses of the Fall (translated by Mikael de Lara Co and Sasha Martinez), was longlisted for the 2009
Man Asian Literary Prize.
Aside from winning the NBA, two books from his best-selling YA series Janus Silang also received the
Philippine National Children’s Book Award (NCBA) for Best Read for Kids in 2016 and 2018. Samar
has also received prizes for his poetry, essay, children’s story, and short fiction from the Palanca
Awards, the PBBY-Salanga Writer’s Prize, the Gawad Komisyon sa Tula, and Gantimpalang
Collantes. In 2010, he was invited as writer-in-residence to the International Writing Program of the
University of Iowa in the United States, and in 2017, as a guest author to the Sharjah International
Book Fair in the United Arab Emirates.
He has served as a judge in several national literary competitions, including the Palanca and the
National Book Award. In 2023, he was voted vice chair of the National Committee on Literary Arts
of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, where he co-headed projects like the Gawad
Bienvenido Lumbera.
About the book:
Title: Trilohiya ng Mga Bilang
Author: Edgar Calabia Samar
Publication year: 2023
Content tags: Novel, Speculative, Magical realism
ISBN: 9789715508346
Original Language: Filipino (Tagalog)
Awards won: 2005 NCCA Writers’ Prize (Volume 1: Walong Diwata ng Pagkahulog), 2013 National
Book Award for best Novel in Filipino (Volume 2: Sa Kasunod ng 909), 2022 Palanca Awards for
Literature Special Prize (Volume 3: Teorya ng Unang Panahon)
Translations available: English (for Volume 1: Eight Muses of the Fall, first edition)
Edgar Calabia Samar’s Trilohiya ng mga Bilang are three novels, set in the provincial cities of San Pablo
and Marikina at various periods and in different worlds, that ponder on the meaning of youth and
gender and take us on a mystical journey through lives that are simultaneously formed and
deconstructed by emotions and the trappings of home and the universe.
Eight Muses of the Fall (Volume 1 of the trilogy) is on the one hand a young man’s frustrated attempt
to write the great Filipino novel, and on the other, his coming to terms with the futility of his search
for his lost mother. Along the way, he is guided and misdirected by some muses and demons to
reimagine his personal past without the burden of national history. He will be forced to accept that
truth can somehow be in the deceptive, inchoate recreation of memories, without which, the fall
seems inevitable.
“… [Volume 1: Walong Diwata ng Pagkahulog] reconfigures the labels of “fantasy” and “realism” by
anchoring itself on playfulness of form while being hounded still by a sense of perturbation.
––PERSPECTIVES IN THE ARTS AND HUMANITIES ASIA
For further information please contact:
Dr Rica Bolipata-Santos
Director Ateneo de Manila University Press
E-mail: [email protected]
Website: Ateneo de Manila University Press