Hualing Nieh Engle

Nieh Hua-ling was born on 11 January 1925 in Wuhan, Hubei, China. In 1936, Nieh's father, an official of the Kuomintang administration, was executed by the Communist Red Army during the Chinese Civil War.

In 1948, she graduated with a degree in English from the Western Languages Department of National Central University.[1] Following the Chinese Communist Revolution, she and her family relocated to Taiwan.

In Taiwan, Nieh became the literary editor and a member of the editorial board of Free China Journal, a liberal intellectual magazine. She served in these positions until 1960, when the magazine was closed down by the Chiang Kai-shek administration.

She also began to teach creative writing courses at National Taiwan University and Tunghai University,[1] becoming the first faculty member to do so in Chinese.

She met Paul Engle, then director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, while he was visiting Taiwan to research the contemporary literary scene in Asia. He invited her to attend the Writers' Workshop. As the political climate grew worse in Taiwan, she was placed under surveillance and prevented from publishing. She decided to accept Engle's invitation and arrived in Iowa City in 1964 with seven books already published.

In 1966, after receiving her Master of Fine Arts degree in fiction from the Writers' Workshop, she suggested to Engle, then retiring from the Workshop, that they start a writing program solely for international writers. Their joint plan was to invite published writers from all over the world to Iowa City to hone their craft, exchange ideas, and create cross-cultural friendships. With support from the University of Iowa and a private grant, the first group of international writers convened in Iowa City in 1967 as the first participants in the International Writing Program (IWP).[2] They were married in 1971.

With Engle as director and Nieh Engle as assistant director and then associate director, the International Writing Program grew into a recognized residency for literary artists. As an active editor, Nieh Engle sought to introduce little-known Chinese literary trends emerging even in the middle of the Cultural Revolution. She and Engle translated and edited a collection of Mao Zedong's poems. This was followed by a two-volume scholarly collection, Literature of the Hundred Flowers, which she edited and co-translated.

In 1976, to honor their role in promoting exchange among international artists, 300 writers advanced the Engles for the Nobel Peace Prize. The pair was officially nominated by US Ambassador at Large W. Averell Harriman. In 1979 they coordinated a "Chinese Weekend," one of the first encounters between writers from mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the diaspora after 1949.[3]

Nieh Engle continued as the director of the International Writing Program (IWP) after Engle's retirement in 1977. She retired in 1988, and currently serves as a member of the IWP Advisory Board. She was also a member of the panel of judges for the prestigious Asiaweek Short Story Competition.[4]

At the University of Iowa, she was co-director of the Translation Workshop from 1975 to 1988. She has received several honorary doctorates as well as an award for Distinguished Service to the Arts from the State of Iowa and the National Association of Governors in 1982. The Chinese magazine Asia Weekly named her novel Sang ch'ing yu t'ao hung (Mulberry and Peach) as one of the top 100 Chinese novels of the 20th century.[5]

Alongside her administrative and editorial work, Nieh Engle has maintained an active literary career. She is the author of more than two dozen books, written in Chinese and widely translated, including novels, essay collections, collections of stories, translations, and edited works. These include Mulberry and Peach, which, in its English translation (Mulberry and Peach: Two Women of China), won an American Book Award in 1990; Thirty Years Later (San shih nien hou); Black, the Most Beautiful Color (Hei she, he she, tsui mei li ti yen she); and People in the Twentieth Century (Jen tsai erh shih shih chi). Her most recent novel in Chinese, Far Away, a River (Qian shan wai, shui chang liu), depicts one of the themes that are often reflected in her novels: the search for identity and roots. Her memoir, Images of Three Lives, a picture-essay book, chronicles her experiences in China, Taiwan and the United States.

• Honorary Degree, Doctor of Humane Letters, University of Colorado (1981)
• Honorary Degree, Doctor of Humane Letters, University of Dubuque (1981)
• Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts, National Association of Governors (1982)
• Honorary Degree, Doctor of Humane Letters, Coe College (1983)
• Award for Fiction, American Book Award (1990), for Mulberry and Peach: Two Women of China
• Medal of Merit for Cultural Service, Ministry of Culture, Poland (1992)
• Honorary Degree, Doctor of Humane Letters, Hong Kong Baptist University (2009)
• Best Chinese Writing in the World, Sin Chew Jit Poh, Malaysia (2009)

• Member of the International Advisory Board, Translation Center, Columbia University (1984–85)
• Member of the Advisory Board of the Chinese literary magazine Four Seas, China
• Judge, Neustadt International Prize for Literature, USA (1981–82)
• Advisory Professorship, Fudan University, Shanghai, China (1984)
• Honorary Professorship, Beijing Institute of Communications, Beijing, China (1986)
• Advisor, Pegasus International Prize for Fiction, USA (1989–90)
• Inducted into Iowa Women's Hall of Fame (2008)

• Interview from the 2009 Mid-Autumn Festival issue of Full Tilt Magazine
• Extracts from the works of Paul and Nieh Engle