Fiction and graphite, gardener of difficult things
Represented by Kate Evans at Peters Fraser + Dunlop
I'm a novelist and artist, Filipino-British, living in Cambridge by way of Manila and New York. I've never quite stopped being from all three places, and my fiction tends to live in the gaps between them.
My work explores the structures people build to hold themselves together, the Filipino diaspora, and the supernatural as social fact rather than metaphor. I hold an MFA from Goddard College, where I studied under Alexander Chee, and my fiction has been longlisted for the Lucy Cavendish Prize.
I'm a writer first, always. But drawing grounds the imagination in visual language that finds its way back into the prose. I work in graphite, mostly flowers and the things that grow through cracks. I tend a garden of forty-seven rose varieties. I make illustrated literary zines under the name Overgrown Ink. All of it is the same impulse in different soil.
The Prayer Eaters is a literary novel set on a fictional Philippine island, narrated by Lia Amihan, the only daughter of a prayer-eating matriarch, though she cannot eat prayers herself. When Lia begins working for Paolo Sidapa, a young man who is also, in the older island understanding of things, a death god, she finds herself navigating her family's inheritance, her best friend's quiet devotion, the weight of belonging to people who need her, and the approaching scholarship that will finally let her leave.
At its heart, it is a novel about the cost of being loved and the grace of being released.
My mother ate prayers for a living. She would go to the church, prostrate in a pose that aspired to be both sage and muse. She would have poured the hours before dawn into looking her best, except she didn't know her best self was best viewed at an angle from at least five feet away. From there, she looked like a dream. Up close, you can see what holds dreams up.
"But our friendship was littered with words we never spoke aloud, with stoppered chemistry we never let spark, with pauses and silences, and faintest brushes of skin on skin. We excelled in barely touching."
The women I draw are rarely at peace. They're overgrown, mid-transformation, caught between something they were and something they're becoming. These drawings inhabit the same world as my fiction, where the line between woman and landscape was never very firm to begin with.
Graphite drawings and speculative fiction exploring women altered by what they cultivate, whether that's love, shame, belief, beauty, or insecurity, and what grows back.
Volume 1 sold out. Stocked at Quimby's Brooklyn and Good Press Glasgow.
Volume 2 forthcoming, London Zine Fest, August 2026.
May 2026 — The Prayer Eaters manuscript completed
February 2026 — Overgrown Ink Volume 1 released, sold out first edition
2023 — The Prayer Eaters longlisted for the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize
For literary enquiries, contact Kate Evans at Peters Fraser + Dunlop
For everything else, wanda.m.albano@gmail.com