Dr Arturo B Rotor Memorial Awards or Literature Winners 2025

Awardees 4th Year 2025

Dr. Arturo B. Rotor Memorial Awards for Literature, 2025

Philippine College of Physicians (PCP Foundation, Inc)

Executive Secretary of the Philippines

June 13, 1942 – November 30, 1944

President Manuel L. Quezon

Preceded by Manuel Roxas

Born June 7, 1907 Died April 9, 1988 (aged 80)

Profession Doctor, musician, writer, government official; scientist, Rotor Syndrome, a liver disease named after him; honoree, Dr Arturo B Rotor Memorial Awards for Literature (PCP Foundation) 

Creative Non-Fiction Category 

Poetry Category

3rd Placer

"ELEMENTS"

by Eva SE Aranas-Angel, MD

“We must have something to cling to. 

Some things must not change.”  

Message of Dr Arturo B Rotor then at 75, 

five years before he died in 1988  

ARTURO B. ROTOR (1907- 1988)

Rotor is a unique combination of writer, musician and physician who was once upon a time before the war one of the country’s most active and distinguished writers of short stories. His stories were so highly regarded that the first publication of the Philippine Book Guild was a collection of his stories called The Wound and the Scar (1937). But since he exchanged his pen for a stethoscope he has not done any writing except making out prescriptions for his patients. And the reason he gave is contained in a letter he wrote to Alejandro R. Roces:

           “. . . I am no longer young, and because when I entered the practice of medicine I discovered suddenly that I did not possess the vocabulary to record or describe what I saw. I could write vividly enough about characters which existed in my imagination. But when I saw them in my clinic and noted the caught breath or measured the quickening pulse, I found myself inarticulate. I knew then that what I had written before was written neither with understanding nor with compassion. And so I am learning how to write all over again. . .”

A collection of ten short stories by Dr Arturo B Rotor, published by Ateneo de Manila University Printing Press

            

Like Roces, Rotor is from Manila. He was born in Sampaloc in 1907 and had his elementary schooling at the Burgos Elementary School, but finished high school in U.P. High. When he was studying medicine at the University of the Philippines, he was also studying music at the Conservatory. He finished both courses. While still an undergraduate, he worked as magazine editor of the Philippines Herald; and after graduation as literary editor of the National Review. This is why the artist, the doctor and the journalist are evident in his stories where on finds in abundance the artist’s sensitiveness to music and beauty, a meticulous analysis of the physician’s behavior, and a newspaperman’s eyes for details.

            Though Rotor has faded out of the literary horizon, The Wound and the Scar still sustains his reputation as a writer. The title is of course indicative of the author’s medical background. Of the eleven stories in it, six are about doctors and the rest on varied subjects ranging from flowers to music and from journalism to bucolic life. One of them, “Dahong Palay,” won first prize in a story contest sponsored by a local daily before the war, but the best of them, in spite of the author’s courageous admission of his limitations as a writer, is the medicated stories based on his experiences as a medical practitioner.

            Reminiscent of Emerson’s indictment of the American scholar, Rotor once stirred a literary controversy with a speech, “Our Literary Heritage,” delivered before the first Congress of Filipino Writers’ League in 1940. He accused Filipino writers in English of lacking social consciousness and advocated for a dynamic proletarian literature to offset the timid and anemic literature being produced then by local writers. He lamented their art-for-art’s-sake attitude and their emphasis in form and pattern that have blinded them to the vital issues that affected themselves and their country.

            “While the rest of the country is talking about the slums of Tondo and the peasants in Central Luzon,” he said, “our poets still sing ecstatically about the sunset in Manila Bay. . . It is hard to say, but it seems our writers have lost all the contact with the people whom they are supposed to represent. . . While the rest of the English writers search the four corners of the world for new things to write about, all around us, to be had for the taking, is original, vitally significant material. Yet we go on ignoring this and using that others have discarded.” For his pains in arousing social consciousness among the writers, he was accused by a critic of advocating literary dictatorship.

            All of Rotor’s stories were written before the war when short-story writing had barely shed off its swaddling clothes. And yet some of them are some of the best written in this country with hardly any trace of craft amateurism. Others, however, display conspicuous evidence of theatricalism and other traces of romanticism. The over-rated “Zita,” for example, is very Byronic, while “Dahong Palay” melodramatic and contrived. But these minor flaws hardly tip the balance, which is more on the merit side. The best stories of Rotor are the realistic, plotless ones where things happen in an apparently casual sequence of events where incidents are seen and suggested rather than planned one after another to follow a regular order of occurrence and climactic ending. His training as a physician evidently schooled him in realizing that all things, however trivial, are in themselves important, that a casual remark or a seemingly trifling incident all contribute to the flow and force of the stream. This accounts for the sometimes mountain of details in the stories that seem unrelated and unnecessary but which in reality all fit in the complete picture.

            Rotor the writer developed side by side with Rotor the physician. His stories gradually came to depend more and more on actual observations and experiences for materials than on contrived plots. Imagination gave way to the reality of life. He stopped studying life from books and took lessons from those that came to him in pain. He wrote about what he saw and experienced. He became more autobiographical. Thus we see Rotor the socialite in “Color of Her Nails,” Rotor the musician in “Dance Music,” Rotor the flower lover in “Flower Shop,” and finally Rotor the doctor in “Convict’s Twilight” and in other stories.

           

            Rotor was in the United States when the war broke out in the Pacific. He worked as secretary to the exiled Philippine government in Washington and waded on the beach in Leyte with General MacArthur’s liberation forces in 1944. At present he is practicing his profession and teaching medicine at the University of the Philippines. Evidently he is “still learning to write all over again” because he has not yet done any writing since the war. He hopes, however, to write a history of the exiled Philippine government, of which he is qualified, but not still after all the active participants have departed.

Pathway to Philippine Literature in English
An Anthology with Biographical and Critical Introductions
- Arturo G. Roseburg 1958 

Author's Note: With apologies to Dr Eva SE Aranas-Angel for the delayed posting of her name as third placer, Poetry.  Congratulations to all contestants in both Non-Fiction and Poetry categories. - Dr AV Rotor