Creative Writing MA at Royal Holloway University of London

The course

This course allows you to develop your work as a writer to a professional level, going beyond the personal and writing with an engaged sense of literary culture, its social role and contemporary practices. The MA is designed for those who are dedicated to their practice and want to see their work in print. Individual creative practice will be fostered in weekly workshops, critical classes and tutorials.

You will take one of four distinct pathways: Fiction, Literary Non-Fiction,* Poetry or Poetic Practice, working in small groups and with extensive individual attention. In addition to the workshop, you will take modules in Supplementary Discourses and Reading as a Writer. You will submit critical and creative coursework, and will undertake a final practical project and critical dissertation. Our summer programme of events and masterclasses introduces you to leading writers, editors and agents who advise on how to take the next step.

• This MA is taught in Bedford Square, in the heart of literary Bloomsbury.
• The course ranks among the top creative-writing programmes in the country and is taught by leading writers. Jo Shapcott has received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, the Forward Prize, and the Whitbread Prize. Lavinia Greenlaw has received a Forward Prize for Poem of the Year, the Prix du Premier Roman and the Ted Hughes Award. Nikita Lalwani won the Desmond Elliot Award, and was shortlisted for the Costa Prize and longlisted for the Man Booker prize. Eley Williams has won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Republic of Consciousness Prize. Robert Hampson was longlisted for the Forward Prize. Redell Olsen has been Judith E. Wilson Fellow in Poetry at Cambridge.
• Our prizewinning, internationally successful alumni include the novelists Sarah Perry, Tahmima Anam, Jenni Fagan and Barney Norris; short-story writer and poet Eley Williams; and the poets Liz Berry, Kayo Chingonyi, Sam Riviere and Sophie Robinson.

Fiction

You will learn how to structure and edit your prose to a publishable standard while also developing an expert sense of how best to draw on the personal, the actual and the imagination. We have no house style, and encourage both experiment and rigour. In developing your analytical and editorial skills, you will sharpen your self-criticism.

Literary Non-Fiction

You will explore the broad range of possibilities that literary non-fiction has to offer from memoir to manifesto, from the essay to the hybrid form. You will be taught how to research, and how to activate and deploy your material. You will learn how to draw on these to develop original work of your own to publishable standard.

Poetry

This pathway is for writers of all kinds of poetry, who are focused on publication on the page. You will learn how to locate and refine your personal poetics, and how to develop a poem to its fullest potential. You will be taught how to revise and edit a poem, how to sustain a writing practice, and how to locate your poetry within a broader literary context.

Poetic Practice

This pathway foregrounds the writing in an expanded field of contemporary poetic practice. It offers a consideration of contemporary trends in innovative and experimental poetry: redefinitions of lyric writing, bookworks, visual poetics, performance, sound, conceptual writing, digital poetics and site-specific work.

Your future career

A significant number of our Creative Writing students have become published authors or found work in publishing and allied professions.

We have an impressive record for placing graduates in academic jobs; recently they've secured positions at the Universities of Edinburgh, Leeds, Sussex and UEA, Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre and the National University of Ireland.

This course will give you a distinctive, creative edge in careers such as publishing, teaching, writing and journalism, administration and marketing. Recent graduates have taken up jobs at the BBC and in art therapy.