Raymundo Torres Pandan, a Bacolodnon lawyer and professor, was chosen as the grand prize winner in the novel category of the 2022 Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for his novel, Bittersweetland. The awarding will take place this November 30, 2022 at Bonifacio Global City, Taguig.

According to Pandan, Bittersweetland is a novel that was written in a span of one month. It was a novel for Negros, for its people, for the crop which sustain us, and which we must sustain to endure, but also to endure our bittersweet life.

Bittersweetland is set to be published mid of December 2022 or early 2023.

Atty. Pandan has been in the legal service for 32 years already and was once named as the country’s youngest law school dean in 1997 at the University of St. La Salle-Bacolod.

He was co-counsel for the petitioner in the leading freedom of expression case, “Diocese of Bacolod v. Comelec.”

Aside from his novel Bittersweetland, Atty. Pandan also won the Cirilo F. Bautista Grand Prize for the Novel Category with his work entitled “When Will This War End?” in 2015.

Moreover, he also won two 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) grant 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.”

Atty. Pandan is the Project Director of Iyas National Writers’ Workshop that is based in Bacolod City, one of only four writers’ workshops funded by the NCCA.
(Source: Bacolod City Public Information Office)