The International Institute of Modern Letters is again doing their special summer writing workshop taught by recent winners of the Schaeffer Award in America. The workshop will have separate poetry and short fiction streams, each of which will be limited to twelve students.

The Schaeffer Award goes to outstanding creative writing graduates from the Universities of California, Nevada and Iowa. The two that are teaching this summer’s workshop are Earle Mccartney (teaching fiction) and Megan Johnson (poetry). They hail from the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop, America's oldest and most prestigious creative writing programme, which numbers among its graduates a dozen winners of the Pulitzer Prize.

The fiction workshop runs from 6 December to 11 February. Students will be expected to complete exercises, critiques and readings, and to submit two short stories to be workshopped over the course of the semester. Fiction set for reading and discussion will include the longer works of writers such as William H Gass, Katherine Anne Porter, Richard Yates, Isak Dinesen and Alice Munro.

The poetry workshop runs from 4 January - 18 February, and will focus on lyric poetry: assigned readings will be of American poets including Emily Dickinson, Frank O'Hara, John Berryman, Jorie Graham and Anne Lauterbach. There’ll be in-class writing exercises and student poems will be workshopped.

The application deadline for both fiction and poetry streams of the workshop is 12 November. Application forms are available from the IIML website.