Kerima Polotan Tuvera

Kerima Polotan-Tuvera (December 16, 1925 – August 19, 2011) was a Filipino fiction writer, essayist, and journalist. with whom she had 10 children, among them the fictionist Katrina Tuvera. of then-President Ferdinand Marcos. Her husband's work drew her into the charmed circle of the Marcoses. It was during this time that Polotan-Tuvera penned the only officially approved biography of the First Lady Imelda Marcos, Imelda Romualdez Marcos: a biography of the First Lady of the Philippines.

During the years of martial law in the Philippines, she founded and edited the officially approved FOCUS Magazine, Her short stories “The Trap” (1956), “The Giants” (1959), “The Tourists” (1960), “The Sounds of Sunday” (1961) and “A Various Season” (1966) all won the first prize of the Palanca Awards.

The 1961 Stonehill Award was bestowed on Polotan-Tuvera, for her novel The Hand of the Enemy. In 1963, she received the Republic Cultural Heritage Award, an award discontinued in 2003 but was then considered the government’s highest form of recognition for artists at the time. The city of Manila conferred on Polotan-Tuvera its Patnubay ng Sining at Kalinangan Award, in recognition of her contributions to its intellectual and cultural life. The official statement recognized Polotan-Tuvera's body of work as "crucial to the development of Philippine Literary Fiction written from English" and cited Polotan-Tuvera's influence on "generations of writers."

In the eulogy for Polotan-Tuvera, fellow Palanca-winning writer and friend Rony Diaz said, "The number of books that she has written doesn’t really matter because all of them contain stories and essays of compelling beauty and profound wisdom."

Polotan-Tuvera is survived by her ten children and nineteen grandchildren.