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AUTHOR’S BIOGRAPHY

Alberto “Bert” S. Florentino was born on July 28, 1931 in a “barrio” or cluster of
nipahuts in the Philippines. Soon after, the family moved to a satellite city, Cabanatuan,
some kilometers away. His father, a teacher, had an extracurricular interest in play
directing and organizing school choir groups. He enlisted the younger Florentino as his
typist, turning out multiple copies of plays using a lightweight portable typewriter. “I read
those plays as I typed them and probably learned playwriting in the manner.” (Personal
Interview). Some years later, the Florentino’s moved gain to Manila where he would live
for the next forty years. Florentino graduated from Torres High School in Manila. Prior to
college (1948), Florentino’s main interest was science. Using “war surplus” optical
lenses then available, he made his own microscopes and telescopes, viewing tiny
paramecia and amoeba, as well as the grand planet of Jupiter, with its dancing moons.
By chance, he saw his name in print in a Manila paper when a letter he had written to
the editor was published. Encouraged, he submitted a political parody of Robert
Browning’s “Pippa Passes”, which was also printed. Soon after, he won fifteen peso in a
short story contest in the Daily Mirror, a weekly newspaper.

Florentino pursued his modest education in the U.S. Information Service Escoyla,
Manila’s first university without walls, and then at the University of the East at twenty-
three. He was a conscientious student, as his mother was paying for his tuition out of
her grocery money. He continued at the University of the Philippines and Far Eastern
University but it was at the University of the East that his interest in playwriting began to
develop. He saw plays written by elder playwrites Nick Joaquin, Wilfirdo Guerrero, and
Severino Montano, who were the powerhouses of the Philippine drama in the 1950s
and 1960s.

At the University of the East, Florentino wrote The World is An Apple and
submitted it for the first annual postwar Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature
(Drama in English). Although he was hoping for the third prize of three hundred pesos,
enough to buy a portable typewriter, the play won first prize. Cadaver, the other play he
submitted, was also vying for the first prize in the same contest. Florentino says, “That
started it all.” In 1954, his first serious attempt at playwriting caused him to abandon his
schooling. Eventually, he went on to write more than fifty plays for the stage and more
than one hundred for television, first in English then in Tagalog.

Following the Palanca Award in 1954, The World is An Apple was published in
the Sunday Times Magazine that same year. It was premiered at the Civic Theatre in
Manila early in the following year. Four years later, the play was adapted for television
and published as the title play in Florentino’s own collection, “The World is An Apple”
and Other Prize Plays (1959).

While Florentino continued to pen-award winning plays and television scripts, he


went into book publishing in 1962, eventually turning out the Peso Book series by
numerous prewar/postwar authors led by seven national artists in literature, 1973. His
writing career also includes serving as editor of numerous literary magazines such as
Short Story International, and as a visiting writer and professor at various universities in
the Philippines and the United States throughout the 1970s. He migrated to the U.S. in
the early 80s and lived in New York where his third daughter Leila took over the role of
Miss Saigon on Broadway after Lea Salonga. He recently moved to Portland, Oregon.

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