Bacolod lawyer Raymundo Torres Pandan has been named the grand prize winner in the novel category of the 2022 Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature.
He won for his entry entitled “Bittersweetland” and has been invited to the awards ceremony at the Ballroom of the Marquis Events Place at Bonifacio Global City in Taguig on November 30.
Pandan has been a practicing lawyer for 32 years, and was the country’s youngest law school dean in 1997 at the University of St. La Salle in Bacolod City.
He was co-counsel for the petitioner in the leading freedom of expression case, “Diocese of Bacolod vs. Comelec.”
Pandan won the 2015 Cirilo F. Bautista Grand Prize for the novel titled “When Will This War End?”.
He has also won two other Palanca Awards, known as the Philippines’s Pulitzer Prize, for poetry in 2006 and for children’s poetry in 2012.
In 2018, the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA) gave him the Taboan Awards for his “masterful craft of poetry and fiction” and a “full life of exemplary service as committed defender of justice and staunch promoter of Philippines letter.”
He is the Project Director of the Iyas National Writers’ Workshop, based in Bacolod City, one of only four writers’ workshops funded by the NCCA.*