Writing MA

Consider the MA Writing programme as part of the ongoing occasion of your learning, one which you have already begun, will share with us for a year, and which will then continue — irrevocably changed — once you leave. While you are with us, you will be taught a lot, but you will learn a great deal more.

There is not one particular type of writer that we would like to produce. Whether you would like to write for a mainstream audience or prepare for doctoral study, we can support you to become the best possible version of the writer you would like to be. If we tend towards anything, it is ‘creative non-fiction’, imperfectly described, although ‘literary writing’, rather than literature, might be a less inadequate alternative. In recent years our students have used the expanded essay to produce an extraordinary range of forms and consider a remarkable range of subjects, and you will be encouraged to do so, too. The projects often combine these different approaches unexpectedly, or fold together established genres – such as memoir and cultural history, for example – to produce work which possesses both intellectual rigour and poetic form.

That writing is in the world, and of it, rather than simply being about it, is a fundamental ethos of the programme, and although this is certainly no vocational programme, you will accumulate many professional skills, and meet a wide range of practitioners, from writers and editors to publishers and commissioners.

We consider the Writing programme similarly: as the means to make better writers, yes, but also better thinkers, people who are better able to notice the world and so discern the best way to engage with it.

Candidates are selected entirely on merit and applications are welcomed from all over the world. The selection process will consider creativity, imagination and innovation as demonstrated in your portfolio, as well as your potential to benefit from the programme and to achieve high MA standards overall.