Bino A. Realuyo is a novelist and poet who was born in Manila, Philippines and raised there and in New York City. His acclaimed novel, The Umbrella Country, published in 1999 by Ballantine Reader's Circle, Random House, was ncluded in Booklist's Top Ten First Novels of 1999. The Umbrella Country was also a finalist for the Barnes and Noble Discover Great Writers Award 1999 and a recipient of an Asian American Literary Award 2000.
Realuyo is currently working on a poetry collection, The Gods We Worship Live Next Door. Poems from his collection have appeared in The Nation, Manoa, Mid-American Review, Puerto del Sol, New Letters, and The Kenyon Review. He is a regular contributor to The Literary Review, and guest edited its special issue on contemporary Filipino literature in Spring 2000. He has also received a Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from Poetry Society of America.
He is currently working on a new novel, The Ashen Parts, and is finishing a collection of short stories about the Filipino-American experience in the U.S. He was the editor of The NuyorAsian Anthology; Asian American writings in New York City, published by the Asian Writer's Workshop and Temple University Press in 1999, and awarded a PEN Open Book Award 2000.
A resident of Manhattan, where he is a literacy educator, Realuyo has a a Bachelor of Arts from the School of International Service of the American University in Washington, D.C., and from the Universidad Argentina de la Empresa in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He is on the faculty of Fairleigh Dickinson University's new International MFA in Creative Writing.
His home on the net is www.geocities.com/Realuyo
Derek Alger: Your novel The Umbrella Country is set in the Philippines during the turbulent martial law period of the 1970s. What prompted you to pick that time period?
Bino Realuyo: I was born to Martial Law. I never saw another political leader or regime during the time that I lived there. It's the time in Philippine history when all its negative colonial influences fused into the body of one man, one monster, one dictator. Yet the time makes interesting fiction. Since it's a familiar political climate for me, I used it as a backdrop for this family I created in The Umbrella Country. How do these repressive elements affect the people's psyche, dreams, lifestyles? It is unfortunate that to this very day, the Philippines still sees the legacy of Martial Law. The leaders of that time are very much alive in their sons and daughters who are very active in government, because they apparently get elected.
DA: Many have described The Umbrella Country as a coming of age story of a young boy's awakening to adulthood. In that sense, you are dealing with a universal theme but in a specific context.
BR: I never thought of the novel as a coming of age story. That was a genre the publishing houses attached to my book because they felt they had to categorize it for marketing purposes. They even put the genre on the cover. There are several voices in the book and many awakenings. Although the novel is seen from Gringo's perspective, the awakenings are occurring all round him.
| 
