Hualing Nieh Engle

Hualing Nieh Engle (born 11 January 1925), née Nieh Hua-ling (Chinese: 聶華苓; pinyin: Niè Huálíng), is a Chinese novelist, fiction writer, and poet. She is a professor emerita at the University of Iowa.

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. Following the communist revolution in China, she and her family relocated to Taiwan.

In Taiwan, Nieh became the literary editor and a member of the editorial board of Free China, 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, 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). They were married in 1971.

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