Photo by Selene Shevlin, 2026
About
“Up close, you can see what holds dreams up.”
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.
I grew up in Manila, oscillating between the city and the sea. I still carry the friends I made when I was five, and twelve, and seventeen. I moved to New York after university, and spent the better part of a decade freelancing, and all that entails. At forty-five, I finally realised that what I wanted to do was the thing I'd been doing quietly the entire time.
I think dreams change and shift, but that we should make sure we dream in different sizes and shapes, and we shouldn't be afraid to reshape our dreams according to the lives we live.
I hold an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College, where I studied under Alexander Chee. My fiction has been longlisted for the Lucy Cavendish Prize. My debut novel, The Prayer Eaters, is represented by Kate Evans at Peters Fraser + Dunlop.
My work explores the structures people build to hold themselves together, mythology as lived experience rather than decoration, and the supernatural as social fact. I'm interested in women whose bodies become landscapes, in prayer as labour, in the precise weight of being loved by people who need you more than they see you.
I draw in graphite, mostly flowers and women and the things that grow through cracks. I tend a garden of forty-seven rose varieties — I love lush, beautiful, slightly wild, sometimes untended things. I make illustrated literary zines under the name Overgrown Ink. All of it is the same impulse in different soil.
I live in Cambridge with my husband, Henry, and our children, Stephen and Selene. They are part of the life around the work: the noise outside the door, the little rituals, the drawings taped to walls, the garden helped and hindered by small hands, and the daily reminder that making things has to happen inside an actual, beloved, and sometimes inconvenient life.