The Lost Vision

Ken Fuller has held a number of “day jobs.” Most recently, he was for twenty years a trade union official in London. In his spare time, however, he has always written. In the 1970s, he published numerous articles on the Caribbean, which he first visited as a merchant seaman in 1969–1970.

In 1985 his labor history, Radical Aristocrats: London Busworkers from the 1880s to the 1990s, was published in London by Lawrence and Wishart.

Since the late 1980s, Fuller’s journalism has concentrated on the Philippines, to which he eventually emigrated in 2003. In doing so, he parted company with the very concept of the “day job,” following which his literary productivity registered a steep increase. Since his arrival here, he has written two comic novels (as yet unpublished), contributed occasional articles to progressive journals in London, and for over six years wrote a weekly column to the Daily Tribune in Manila.

He has also completed his three-volume history of the Philippine left, of which The Lost Vision is the final installment. Previous volumes, also published by UP Press, were Forcing the Pace: The Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas, from Foundation to Armed Struggle (2007; a finalist in the history category of the 2008 National Book Awards, this was also published as an e-book by Flipside Publishing in 2011), and A Movement Divided: Philippine Communism, 1957–1986 (2011). His e-book The Long Crisis: Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and Philippine Underdevelopment was published by Flipside Publishing in 2013.

Fuller has just completed a study of the American crime writer Dashiell Hammett and, while seeking a publisher for his two novels, is now at work on a similar volume on Raymond Chandler.