PrairieLights: IWP Sunday Afternoon Reading Series

Join them for their annual IWP Sunday Afternoon Reading Series! This week’s event features IWP Residents Sang Young Park (South Korea) and Yaiza Berrocal Guevara (Spain). They will be joined by Iowa Writers’ Workshop Fiction candidate, Toye Oladinni, and Associate Director of Writing Education for the Office of Writing and Communication at the University of Iowa, Danielle Wheeler.

Sangyoung Park is a prominent South Korean novelist and screenwriter, internationally recognized for his sharp emotional insight, wit, and nuanced exploration of urban life, intimacy, and identity. His bestselling novel, Love in the Big City, has been translated into more than twenty languages and was longlisted for the International Booker Prize, the Dublin Literary Award, and the Prix Médicis étranger. Beyond the page, Park has established himself as a versatile creator, serving as the writer and creator for the global television adaptation of his own work.

Yaiza Berrocal Guevara (playwright, fiction writer, screenwriter; Spain) is the author of a novel, several plays and a screenplay. Her literary work includes Curling (2022), published in the UK in 2025 and forthcoming in Greek in 2026. She is currently working on her second novel, Las promesas. As a playwright, she received Spain’s Calderón de la Barca National Prize for La cadena del frío, later staged in Sala Beckett, Barcelona. Her other plays include Intenta viure sense mi, Ni temeré les feres, Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses nunca antes representadas (documentary theatre) and Flesh Market. She is also the screenwriter of the animated feature Black Butterflies, winner of the Goya Award for Best Animated Film, as well as the Gaudí, Forqué, Quirino, and Platino awards, and has written for prime-time television series.

Toye Oladinni is a British Nigerian writer and filmmaker from London. His work has appeared in Granta, The Paris Review Daily, and The Relegation Reader, among other places, and is forthcoming in the London Review of Books. He is currently studying for an MFA in Fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Danielle Wheeler was born in a small town in the Midwest and was the 2010-2011 Rona Jaffe Fellow in Poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, an instructor of Creative Writing Studio Workshop for undergraduates, and a volunteer writing instructor with the Iowa Youth Writing Project. She is currently an instructor of writing and Associate Director, Writing Education for the Office of Writing and Communication at the University of Iowa. Her first book, Men of Northern Constellations, is forthcoming in 2027.