University of Iowa professor Ana Merino won the Premio Nadal, one of the oldest and most prestigious awards in Spanish literature, for her first novel, El mapa de los afectos.

The 2007 graduate of the Iowa Playwrights Workshop left his home state 20 years ago. While rehearsing his new play, “Greater Clements,” he drove through the lonesome landscapes that still inspire his work.

The University of Iowa is often regarded as “the Writing University” because of its world-renowned Iowa Writers’ Workshop, but an appreciation and commitment to great writing is evident across the entire UI campus—including the Carver College of Medicine.

Karen Carcia, adjunct assistant professor in the University of Iowa Center for the Book, has been honored with the Emerging Educator award from the College Book Art Association.

Jennifer Croft never had any doubt Olga Tokarczuk would win a Nobel Prize. "Now editors are actually tweeting ‘Oh, I wish I’d listened to Jennifer Croft 10 years ago, I would be rich now,’” said Croft, an English translator for Tokarczuk's work.

The role of Japanese waka, a 32-syllable precursor to haiku, caught between two imperial factions is the focus of Kendra Strand’s book, An Unfamiliar Place: Poetry, Landscape, and Power in Medieval Japanese Travel Writing. Strand is assistant professor in the Department of Asian and Slavic Languages and Literature.

HBO has put in development The Most Fun We Ever Had, a drama-series project based on Claire Lombardo’s New York Times bestselling novel, from Amy Adams and Stacy O’Neil’s Bond Group Entertainment and Laura Dern and Jayme Lemons’ Jaywalker Pictures.

Kristen Radtke, a 2012 graduate of the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, won the 2019 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant. Given annually by the Whiting Foundation, the grant awards $40,000 to a writer "in the process of completing a book of deeply researched and imaginatively composed nonfiction."

Ashley Wurzbacher, author of Happy Like This, released this fall from the University of Iowa Press, was named one of the 2019 National Book Award’s 5 Under 35 authors.

Calvin Hennick, who earned a bachelor's degree in English in 2004 from the University of Iowa, has won the Pushcart Editors' Book Award for his new book, Once More To The Rodeo: A Memoir.