Course summary

Our MA Creative Writing will help you to fulfil your potential as a writer, whether you work in fiction, poetry, screenplay or creative non-fiction. It is taught by distinguished authors, with the support of a superb range of guest seminars by visiting speakers organised through our Institute of Creative and Critical Writing. Writers are perpetual students. Our programme is designed to help you learn how to keep learning, enriching and refining your practice as an independent author, through disciplines that strengthen your creative imagination, develop your literary knowledge, and cultivate your critical sensitivity. You will hone the skills you need and refine your practice in an atmosphere of creative experiment. Our course is founded upon the philosophy that writers can benefit from the same kind of professional training enjoyed by actors, dancers, musicians, and visual artists, and connects our writers to the creative sector in which they work. You’ll have the opportunity to develop your writing across forms and extend your range in fields that may be new to you, under specialist guidance in fiction, poetry, screenwriting and creative non-fiction. You’ll be part of a Faculty with a long history of working with the creative industries, and a College with strong connections to literary culture beyond the university, including Writing West Midlands, the Birmingham Literature Festival, the National Writers’ Conference, Verve Poetry Festival, The Emma Press, and Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, which was founded by alumni of the MA Creative Writing programme. Like our partners, we see the literary arts and their study and enjoyment as fundamental to civic and cultural life. Writers help shape the culture into which new literary works are received, as readers and thinkers, and our MA Creative Writing emphasises the close relationship between creativity and critical awareness. You will be introduced to ways of conceptualising creative writing as a form of knowledge and research, and each of our modules will help you to explore and apply critical methods both to your own work and the contexts in which it will be read. Our course will help you become more confident in developing and presenting your writing across the key areas in which contemporary authors work: in print publication, on digital platforms, and in-person public events.