Acclaimed writer Nathan Englander, an alumnus of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, will return as a guest of the workshop to present a free reading at 8 p.m. Monday, April 30, in Lecture Room 2 of Van Allen Hall.

Nathan Englander

His latest book is What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank: Stories, which Michael Chabon described as “certifiable masterpieces of contemporary short-story art.”

Englander’s first novel, The Ministry of Special Cases, was published in 2008, and his short fiction has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker and numerous anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Anthology, and a Pushcart Prize collection.

Englander’s story collection, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, became an international bestseller and earned him a PEN/Faulkner Malamud Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Englander was selected as one of the “20 Writers for the 21st Century” by The New Yorker. He was awarded the Bard Fiction Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and he was a Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library in 2004.

This year, along with the publication of his new collection, Englander's play The Twenty-Seventh Man will premiere at the Public Theater in New York, and his co-translation New American Haggadah was published. He also co-translated UI International Writing Program veteran Etgar Keret's Suddenly A Knock at the Door. Visit his blog.

The Writers’ Workshop is a unit of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the UI Graduate College. For more information or special accommodations for this event, contact the workshop at 319-335-0416.