Course summary

Our BA (Hons) Creative and Professional Writing with English Literatures is one of a handful of courses in the UK that offers this particular joint award with creative and professional writing (many do not offer both elements). You will also have the opportunity to engage with a Learning Pathway choosing either Poetry, Prose, Professional or Specialist Writings via a range of optional modules at Level 5. These pathways are designed to both enable you to take ownership over your learning and become more specialist within your writing practice, and work as complementary to English Literatures modules. Some modules are interdisciplinary in their nature and delivery (e.g. 5EN007 Children's Literature); others will offer you the opportunity to study writers of the region as your potential contemporaries (e.g. 4EN013 The Midlands in Literature), or to explore a form that can enhance written practice in terms of genre (e.g. 4EN008 Making a Scene/5EN011 Adventures in the Gothic). There are also modules that will offer insight into the transcultural literary landscape that now delineates the publishing industry (e.g. 6EN004 The Centre Cannot Hold: Postcolonial Texts). This will not only better prepare you for industry and working within literary fields, but you will be equipped with the tools for the business of writing and to manage a portfolio career. This programme is devised to enable writers to write and read widely around their subject; to develop skills, talent, and style within a variety of writing contexts, creative and professional. This is all enhanced by the dual focus of analysing existing literatures in terms of genre and subject and understanding how historical contexts continue to apply to our writing today. Led by a team of active published writers and leading academics in their fields of expertise, we work to the ethos that ‘as you write it, we are writing too’, offering an inclusive and supportive environment as one cohesive learning, reading, and writing community. We are aware of what writers need to do in terms of the business of writing; how our knowledge and passion for literatures enables our practice, and therefore offer a continuous platform of support and guidance alerting students to the many career routes a writer can pursue. Our new Learning Pathways programme will enable you to take ownership of your own learning from Level 5, allowing you to either pursue a more specialist approach to your writing, mastering your medium, work piecemeal across the different forms and styles of writing we study, or opt for literatures-based modules to complement practice. The programme will introduce you to the relevant concepts and theories associated with writing and readerships, and encourage you to work across disciplines via our collaborative partnerships with the School of Art. A dedicated Writing Week in Week 7 brings the whole cohort together - UG and PG students - as one learning community, offering dedicated writing spaces and access to authors and industry experts. This degree will not only nurture your reading, literary knowledge, critical skills, and practice by enabling you to foster a profound understanding of your authorial intentions and process, but enable you to communicate more effectively, and, through informal workshops, enhance your own creative and critical judgement. Consequently, you will develop a range of vital transferable skills including presentation and oral performance; social media management and digital literacy; close reading skills for editing and proof reading; enterprise and entrepreneurship; project management and working collaboratively, all of which are of immense value in graduate employment and freelance/portfolio careers.