May Manalang Tobias

    

May Tobias is a writer, illustrator, book and graphic designer. She recently quit advertising to 
pursue a first love: writing and illustrating for children. She made her first professional earnings 
as an illustrator at age eight, when she sent drawings weekly to "Uncle Bob's Lucky Seven Club", 
a local children's variety show. For her trouble, she got a check for ten pesos every week. 

The very unusual stories her father told her and her siblings at bedtime inspired her love for 
stories, and her desire to write her own. Her father's stories were not peopled by fairies, princes 
and princesses, but by dreadful creatures of Philippine lower mythology called kapres, duwendes 
and tikbalangs, and they were set in his hometown of San Luis, Pampanga. They seemed like 
frightful stories for a little child, had not the hero in all these stories been a great grand uncle 
named Mariano, who was funny and less than five feet tall.

With some writer friends, May co-founded a group of children's writers called Kuting (Kwentista 
ng mg Tsikiting). May is also a professional illustrator, and an active member of Ang InK (Ang 
Ilustrador ng Kabataan), an organization of children's book illustrators in the Philippines. She 
has written and illustrated two books, "Estrelita" and "Amor" for Adarna House, and is featured 
as writer and illustrator in two anthologies, "All From the Same Tree" (Adarna House) and 
"Water in the Ring of Fire: Folk Tales from Asia Pacific" (Osnofla). She also illustrated Rene O.
Villanueva's "12 Kwentong Pamasko" (Tahanan) and Grace Chong's "The Boy Who Had Five 
Lolas" (Bookmark), aside from stories in "Gintong Habihan" (Tahanan) and "A Child's Heart: 
A Book of Prayers" (Ecpatiyp).

May lives and works in Quezon City, in her design studio called Ideasoup Designs. She is also
Assistant Professor at the University of the Philippines' College of Fine Arts, where she teaches
design. She may be contacted at [email protected]

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