NYS Writers Institute announces community writing workshop

ALBANY, NY (07/24/2015)(readMedia)-- Please Note: Dated Material. Do not run after August 24, 2015

New York State Writers Institute Distinguished Writer-in-Residence and Man Booker International Prize Winner Lydia Davis will conduct a Fiction Master Class Workshop during the fall 2015 semester for community writers. The focus will be on detailed discussion of students' work, but there may also be assigned exercises and/or readings from published novels or short stories to broaden the discussion of topics such as character, plot, style, and form. The workshop is intended for advanced writers - writers who have a publication record in literary journals and/or book form. It will be an intensive five-session workshop.

The Fiction Master Class Workshop is scheduled for Tuesday evenings (October 6, 13, 20, 27, November 3) on the University at Albany Uptown Campus. The workshop is offered free of charge for no credit, and will be limited to ten writers. Admission to the workshop is based on the submission of writing samples. Complete information on the workshop and submission guidelines may be obtained by calling the Institute at 518-442-5620 or by visiting the Institute's website at: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst

Lydia Davis, fiction writer and translator, has received wide acclaim for her extremely brief and brilliantly inventive short stories. She has been called "one of the quiet giants...of American fiction" (Los Angeles Times Book Review), "an American virtuoso of the short story form" (Salon), and "one of the best writers in America" (O Magazine).

In the spring of 2013 Davis received the Man Booker International Prize, one of the most prestigious prizes in the world of literature. The award is given every two years to authors of any nationality in order to recognize an outstanding body of work in English or available in English translation.

Her newest book, which earned rave reviews, is Can't and Won't (2014). She is also the author of The Collected Stories (2009), a compilation of stories from four previously published volumes including Varieties of Disturbance (2007), Samuel Johnson is Indignant (2001), Almost No Memory (1997), and Break it Down (1986). Her novel, The End of the Story, was published in 1995.

Davis received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2003. In granting the award the Foundation praised Davis's work for showing "how language itself can entertain, how all that what one word says, and leaves unsaid, can hold a reader's interest....Davis grants readers a glimpse of life's previously invisible details, revealing new sources of philosophical insights and beauty."

Named a Chevalier and Officier of the Order of Arts and Letters in France, Davis is also one of the most respected translators into English of French literary fiction by Proust and Flaubert, among others.

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