Ian Casocot

Who is Ian Casocot?

Ian Rosales Casocot is a creative writer and journalist from Dumaguete City, Negros Oriental, Philippines. He is known for his prizewinning short stories Old Movies, The Hero of the Snore Tango, Rosario and the Stories, and A Strange Map of Time. He also maintains A Critical Survey of Philippine Literature, a website on Filipino writings and literary criticism.

Casocot studied at the International Christian University and Silliman University where he graduated with a B.A. in Mass Communication. He was a writer for fiction at National Writers’Workshops in Dumaguete, Cebu and Iligan.

Casocot received Don Carlos Palanca, N.V.M. Gonzalez, and the PBBY-Salanga prizes for his fiction. He is also the first winner of the Gregorio C. Brillantes Prize for Prose in the Fully Booked and Neil Gaiman Philippine Graphic/Fiction Awards in 2006. The National Commission for Culture and the Arts selected him as one of the authors for The 2003 UBOD New Writers Series, and subsequently published his first short story collection Old Movies and Other Stories in 2005. FutureShock Prose: An Anthology of Young Writers and New Literatures, an anthology he had edited, received a National Book Award nomination from the Manila Critics Circle. His novel Sugar Land was longlisted in the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize. In the middle of 2010, Casocot was one of only two Filipinos selected to participate in the 43rd International Writing Program of the University of Iowa from August to November of the said year.