F.H. Batacan

FH Batacan is a Filipino journalist and a writer of crime and mystery fiction. She worked in the Philippine intelligence community for nearly a decade and later switched careers to journalism. She has won two Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature – including the 1999 Grand Prize for the English Novel for her first novel, Smaller and Smaller Circles. It would go on to win the Manila Critics’ Circle National Book Award in 2002, as well as the Madrigal-Gonzales Best First Book Award in 2003.
In 2008, her speculative fiction story Keeping Time won first prize for English fiction in the 2008 Free Press Literary Awards. In 2013, her crime fiction story Comforter of the Afflicted was published in Manila Noir by Brooklyn-based Akashic Books. In 2011 Smaller and Smaller Circles was acquired by New York City-based Soho Press, which published it in 2015 as an expanded novel. It was adapted into a feature film in 2017. In 2024, she received the lifetime achievement award for Fiction in English by the Writers' Union of the Philippines (UMPIL) . Her collection of short stories, Accidents Happen, was released by Soho Press in March this year.