Rene Villanueva: Remarkable writer

If you ask creative writers, especially those who started their careers before the turn of this century, who among their peers are the most celebrated and the most influential, chances are that many of them would include Renato “Rene” Villanueva.

They would have good reason to. In his almost three-decade career, Rene wrote prodigiously in three genres: drama, fiction for children, and creative nonfiction. Not only that, he helped educate an entire generation of Filipinos with the children’s television show Batibot, which reached its peak in the 1980s, when he was its head writer and creative force.