English and Creative Writing BA (Hons) at Coventry University

Passion for language and creative writing can lead to exciting careers in publishing, advertising, teaching, journalism and more.

Sharpen your writing skills, free your imagination, let your creative juices flow and be inspired in the company of poets, playwrights, publishers, screenwriters and novelists.

The English and Creative Writing BA (Hons) course is for students who wish to study creative writing alongside English literature and language, which provides them with an option to embark on a career as a professional writer, or to go into more traditional careers linked to English studies such as marketing, publishing or teaching.

Why Coventry University?

An award-winning university, we are committed to providing our students with the best possible experience. We continue to invest in both our facilities and our innovative approach to education. Our students benefit from industry-relevant teaching, and resources and support designed to help them succeed. These range from our modern library and computing facilities to dedicated careers advice and our impressive Students’ Union activities.

Course information

The course combines stylistics, language and literary theory with creative practice, combining both critical and creative thinking.

The creative part of the course includes poetry and descriptive prose in the first year, exploring the use of figurative language in the form of poetry and travel writing. In the second year, you will have the opportunity to explore short fiction for both adults and children, and in the final year you will have the opportunity to explore script writing for film, stage and radio.

Career prospects

Embedded employability will be delivered through an optional placement year, alongside skills and core competency development for all students throughout the course, including engagement with literary festivals.

While the development of transferrable skills that have value for employability is a factor in all modules, Creative Writing employability modules will undoubtedly provide an opportunity for the course’s efforts to embed these skills. They aim to provide you not just with an experiential opportunity to research and learn about the cultural industries but also to learn about a much wider range of employability-related issues. Creative Writing lecturers have close links with industry professionals, utilising WWM and NAWE to expose students to the real-world activities of professional writers.

You may even have the opportunity to have your radio dramas broadcast by the BBC and to produce the CovWords Creative Writing magazine (online and printed). You can engage in submitting work for publication and enter competitions. CovWords exists in multiple formats: as a print version, as a YouTube site for digital performance and as a website which includes conventional and multimodal texts such as poems, stories, digital picture books and radio dramas.

Where our graduates work

Recent graduates of the course have gone on to work in teaching or publishing for companies such as, Granta Magazine. Many also go on to pursue a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing, which we also offer at Coventry University.

As the course also develops other abilities, such as thinking critically and analytically,  research, collating and organising data, a number of previous students have also embarked upon careers as as financial specialists, HR managers or press officers in companies such as Air Products, Tesco and Deutsche Bank.