Creative Writing

Entry requirements

2:2

UK or equivalent degree in single or combined honours English.

Applicant will be required to provide a writing sample, prose of up to 5,000 words or at least 12 pages of poetry reflecting their chosen pathway: Fiction, New Prose Narratives, Poetry, Poetic Practice.

Additionally, a sample of critical writing of up to 1,000 words showing your ability to critically engage with a text.

Months of entry

September

Course content

This course allows you to develop your work as a writer to a professional level, going beyond the personal to write with an engaged sense of literary culture, its social role and contemporary practices. The MA is designed for students with an established writing practice who are intending to develop their creative writing beyond first-degree level. It is also designed for those students wishing to proceed to MPhil or PhD. This MA is taught in Bedford Square in Central London, in the heart of literary Bloomsbury, putting you within walking distance of publishing houses, bookshops, major UK libraries and all of the other cultural attractions of Central London.

You will take one of four distinct pathways:

• Fiction
• Literary Non-Fiction
• Poetry
• Poetic Practice

While the pathways share a similar structure, they are taught separately so as to ensure you can work to a consistently high level. Please see the Course structure section below for more details on each of these.

The MA ranks among the top creative-writing courses in the country and is taught by leading writers whose work encompasses a wide range of approaches and styles.

• Sean Borodale’s Bee Journal was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize and Costa Book Award.
• Lavinia Greenlaw has received a Forward Prize for Poem of the Year, the Prix du Premier Roman, a Wellcome Engagement Fellowship 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.
• Nadifa Mohamed, one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists 2013, has won the Betty Trask Prize and a Somerset Maugham Award.
• Redell Olsen has been Judith E. Wilson Fellow in Poetry at Cambridge.
• Anna Whitwham’s novel Boxer Handsome was a New Statesman and Guardian Book of the Year.
• Eley Williams’s Attrib. and other stories won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Republic of Consciousness Prize.

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.

Information for international students

IELTS score of 7.0 with 7.0 in writing and no sub-score below 5.5 for non-native English speaking applicants.

See our International pages for more information.

Fees and funding

See our Postgraduate fees and funding pages to find out more about funding options, including loans, grants, scholarships and bursaries.