History
The IWP was founded by Paul Engle and Hualing Nieh Engle as a non-academic, internationally focused counterpart to the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
Under the Engles' guidance, hundreds of writers came to Iowa, particularly from parts of the world where literary and personal freedom was often restricted. During the 1970s and 1980s the program's reach towards nations in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and eastern Europe expanded significantly. In 1979 the Engles coordinated a "Chinese Weekend", one of the first significant meetings of writers from mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the Chinese diaspora since 1949. [2]
For their efforts to connect writers worldwide and to promote international understanding, the Engles were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1976.
Hualing Nieh Engle and Paul Engle co-directed the IWP until 1977, after which Engle retired and Hualing continued as sole director. She retired in 1988, and currently serves as a member of the IWP Advisory Board.
Other past directors include Fredrick Woodard (1988), Clark Blaise (1990), Steven Ungar (1998), and Sandra Barkan (1999).
Current activities
The primary residency, which takes place each fall, offers writers the opportunity to participate in American literary, academic, and cultural life through talks, lectures, readings, screenings, stage performances, school visits, and travel, while providing time for personal writing and creative work. University of Iowa students can take several classes built around the work and presence of the IWP residents.
Literary translation is an integral part of the program's mission. At the time of Hualing's retirement, two volumes of selected IWP writings had been compiled under the title Writing From The World, in addition to another collection, The World Comes To Iowa, and more than a dozen individual volumes in the Iowa Translation Series. Today, the IWP supports 91st Meridian, an online literary journal, and the book series 91stM Books, housed at the independent Autumn Hill Books.
In recent years the program has broadened its efforts to promote international connections among writers by organizing a variety of events, some of which take place outside the United States. Among these are:
- Reading tours of American authors in the Middle East and other regions.
- International colloquia on current cultural topics
- Life of Discovery, a multi-year artist exchange program with members of Chinese minority groups
- Between the Lines, a program bringing high school students from Arabic-speaking countries and Russia to Iowa to practice creative writing alongside American students
Funding
A major source of funding for writers attending the IWP is the U.S. Department of State, and the program's administration is supported by the University of Iowa. The IWP also administers grants for writers sponsored for their residency by private and public cultural organizations in the United States and abroad.
The Iowa Writers' Workshop, at the University of Iowa, is a graduate-level creative writing program. At 87 years, it is the oldest writing program offering a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree in the United States. Its acceptance rate is between 2.7% and 3.7%. On the university's behalf, the workshop administers the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism and the Iowa Short Fiction Award.
Paul Hamilton Engle, was an American poet, editor, teacher, literary critic, novelist, and playwright. He is remembered as the long-time director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and as co-founder of the International Writing Program (IWP), both at the University of Iowa.
Madeleine Thien is a Canadian short story writer and novelist. The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature has considered her work as reflecting the increasingly trans-cultural nature of Canadian literature, exploring art, expression and politics inside Cambodia and China, as well as within diasporic East Asian communities. Thien's critically acclaimed novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, won the 2016 Governor General's Award for English-language fiction, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards for Fiction. It was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize, the 2017 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, and the 2017 Rathbones Folio Prize. Her books have been translated into more than 25 languages.
Minae Mizumura is a Japanese novelist. Among other literary awards, she has won the Noma Literary New Face Prize and the Yomiuri Prize.
Alai is a Chinese-language poet and novelist of Rgyalrong Tibetan descent. He is also a former editor of Science Fiction World.
Chi Li is a contemporary female Chinese writer based in Wuhan. She graduated from department of Chinese literature at Wuhan University in 1986. The setting for some of her stories is Changtangkou (长埫口镇) in Xiantao, Hubei.
Hualing Nieh Engle, née Nieh Hua-ling, is a Chinese novelist, fiction writer, and poet. She is a professor emerita at the University of Iowa.
Mani Rao is an Indian poet and independent scholar, writing in English.
Federico Falco is an Argentine writer born in 1977. He holds a BA in communications from Blas Pascal University in Argentina and an MFA in creative writing in Spanish from New York University.
Iman Humaydan is a Lebanese writer, researcher and creative writing professor at Saint-Denis Paris 8 University in France. She was born in the Mount Lebanon governorate in 1956. She studied sociology and Anthropology at the American University in Beirut. Between 2002 and 2006, she conducted a profound research on the Families of the Disappeared persons during the Lebanese civil war. Her research was titled " Neither Here Nor There.. Families of the Disappeared in Lebanon", and was the first in kind in the Arab World. She has published four novels:
Yang Mu was a pen name of Wang Ching-hsien (王靖獻), a Taiwanese poet, essayist, critic, translator, Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at the University of Washington, and Founding Dean at NDHU College of Humanities and Social Sciences and HKUST School of Humanities and Social Sciences. He is considered one of the most accomplished poets writing in Chinese in the 20th and 21st century, known for his lyricism and linguistic ingenuity, modernising the Chinese diction and syntax while reviving a sublime style out of the idiom and imagery of Chinese and Western poetic traditions.
Genevieve L. Asenjo is a Filipino poet, novelist, translator and literary scholar in Kinaray-a, Hiligaynon and Filipino. Her first novel, Lumbay ng Dila, received a citation for the Juan C. Laya Prize for Excellence in Fiction in a Philippine Language in the National Book Award.
Stephanos Stephanides is a Cypriot-born author, poet, translator, critic, ethnographer, and documentary film maker. In 1957 he moved with his father to the United Kingdom and since then he has lived in several countries for more than 34 years. He returned to Cyprus in 1991 as part of the founding faculty of the University of Cyprus where he holds the position of Professor of English and Comparative Literature. Stephanides’ dominant and literary language is English, and he is also fluent in Greek, Spanish and Portuguese. His early migration from Cyprus to the United Kingdom and subsequent work and travel in many countries has been influential in shaping the transcultural character of his work. As a young lecturer at the university of Guyana, he became deeply interested in Caribbean literary and cultural expression and his anthropological work with the descendant of Indian indentured labourers in Guyanese villages and sugar plantations marked the beginning of a lifelong interest in Indian culture and the Indian diaspora, his creative and academic writing span issues of cross-culturality, dislocation and migration. Hail Mother Kali deals with issues of a broken postcolonial society of racially mixed Indian and African descendants in Guyana.
Hon Lai-chu is a Hong Kong writer. She has authored eight books in Chinese and won numerous awards, including the Hong Kong Biennial Award for Chinese Literature for fiction, Taiwan’s Unitas New Writer’s Novella first prize, and the Hong Kong Book Prize. Her books have twice been named to the list of Top Ten Chinese Novels Worldwide, in 2008 and 2009.
Su Weizhen is a Taiwanese writer, educator and editor.
Yeow Kai Chai is a poet, former Straits Times journalist, and the former director of the Singapore Writers Festival. With writings influenced by music videos and other forms of artistic impressions, he is an MA graduate in English Literature from the National University of Singapore, and has published three poetry collections: Secret Manta (2001), Pretend I'm Not Here (2006) and One To The Dark Tower Comes (2021). He is also an editor of the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore.
John Ngosong Nkemngong Nkengasong was a Cameroonian playwright, novelist, poet and scholar. He was often referred to as a "radical visionary" of Anglophone Cameroon and an “ardent upholder of innovative creativity and crusader for the truth” as is demonstrated by his novels, poetry, short stories but most notably his plays.
Angie Chen is a Chinese director based in Hong Kong who has directed such films as My Name Ain’t Suzie (1985) and This Darling Life (2008), the latter of which earning actress Dennie Yip a Hong Kong Film Award for Best Supporting Actress. Her latest work One Tree Three Lives (2012) which is a documentary about the life of Hualing Nieh Engle, was named as a recommended film by the Hong Kong Film Critics Society Award.
Heng Siok Tian is a Singaporean poet and educator. She has published five volumes of poetry: Crossing the Chopsticks and Other Poems (1993), My City, My Canvas (1999), Contouring (2004), Is My Body a Myth (2011) and Mixing Tongues (2011).
The Fall of Language in the Age of English is a Japanese non-fiction book by novelist Minae Mizumura. First published in 2008, the book argues that the Japanese language and Japanese literature are in decline, in part due to the influence of English as a global language, and in part due to failures in Japanese education. Mizumura's criticisms of contemporary Japanese literature and recommendation to eliminate compulsory English language education generated significant public controversy in Japan.
