Maningning Miclat

Biography

Maningning Miclat’s first book was called “Wo De Shi”, Chinese for “My Poems”. It came out in 1987, when the author was fifteen.

She was born on 15 April 1972 in Beijing, where her parents, the Filipinos Mario Ignacio Miclat and Alma Cruz Miclat, were living. As a result she grew up speaking three languages fluently: Mandarin Chinese, Filipino and English. Her younger sister, Banaue, was born in 1979. In the same year as her first book, 1987, she held her first solo show, “Maningning: An Exhibit of Chinese Brush Works”. This was traditional Chinese painting. Four more solo shows followed in the rest of her life. What her paintings are most often remembered for are the Zen-style bamboo compositions; I, unfortunately, can judge them only from descriptions, so I will not try to say more about her manner. In 1990 Miclat became a Fellow of the University of the Philippines National Writers Workshop and won an award there for a play in Filipino. She also took part in the Silliman National Writers Workshop. In 1992 her painting “Trouble in Paradise” won the Grand Prize of the Art Association of the Philippines.

She then enrolled in a master’s programme in fine arts at the University of the Philippines Diliman and began teaching at Far Eastern University in Manila.

She died there, in the Education Hall Building, on 29 September 2000, at the age of twenty-eight. Her second book of poems, “Voice from the Underworld”, appeared in 2000, and in 2001 it was a finalist for the Philippines’ National Book Award. On 15 April 2001, her birthday, friends and family founded the Maningning Foundation, which supports young artists and writers.