Austregelina Espina-Moore
Austregelina Espina Moore
Lina Espina-Moore (b. 1919) belongs to the post Second World War generation of Filipino writers who have contributed much to the vitality of Philippine Literature in English. She has written novels, short stories, essays, and poetry in Cebuano and in English. An outstanding fictionist, her novels and stories written in her native Cebuano have appeared in Bisaya magazine. She has published three novels in English: Heart of the Lotus (1970); A Lion in the House (1980), and The Honey, the Locusts (1992). Her short stories are found in two collections: Cuentos (1985), and Choice (1995).
Some her stories have been translated into Japanese, Mandarin, Mahasa, German, and Tagalog. The former Chair Person of the Cebu Chapter of PEN, she edited Cebuano Harvest (1991). For her distinguished service, she has received many awards, among them the Gawad Pampansang Algad ni Balagtas in 1992 and the SEAWRITE Award in 1989.
She also edited the short stories of another Cebuana writer, The Stories of Estrella Alfon.
Lina Espina-Moore was married for 17 years to C.S. (Kip) Moore, an American lumber company executive. They lived in Mt. Data, Mountain Province, where she wrote extensively on the life an times of the tribal minorities of the Central Cordilleras. She was widowed in 1976. She resided in Alabang, Metro Manila, but moved to her hometown Cebu in recent years to be with her son and his family.
In 2000, to fulfill a promise to Lina, Edna Zapanta Manlapaz wrote Austregelina: A Story of Lina Espina Moore’s Life and Selected Works (Anvil).
Category: Special Collections