author

G. B. (Gabriel Beato) Francisco

An early Tagalog writer from Manila, he is best remembered for pioneering fiction in the language and for writing about the revolutionary era. His surviving work offers a rare glimpse of how Filipino literature was taking shape at the turn of the 20th century.

1 Audiobook

Ang Katipunan

Ang Katipunan

by G. B. (Gabriel Beato) Francisco

About the author

Born in Sampaloc, Manila, Gabriel Beato Francisco was a Filipino writer and journalist associated with the early growth of Tagalog literature. Sources describe him as the author of Cababalaghan ni P. Bravo, widely noted as the first published novel in Tagalog, and of Ang Katipunan, a verse work centered on the 1896 revolution.

He also appears in literary history because of the long-running debate over the poem Sa Aking Mga Kabata. Some later accounts connected him to the poem's transmission, which helped keep his name present in discussions of Philippine letters even beyond his own books.

Reliable biographical details available online are fairly brief, but they consistently present him as an important early voice in Filipino writing whose work helped open space for later Tagalog novelists and poets.