MA Creative Writing Prose Fiction (Part Time)

The part-time MA lasts two years, and is organised over two semesters of 12 weeks. The autumn semester lasts from September to December, and the spring semester from January to April. After Easter in the second year, you will enter the dissertation supervision period, which ends in June. You will submit your final piece of work in September, at the start of the next academic year.

Each semester, you will enrol on two modules. One of these is the compulsory Prose Fiction workshop, a weekly three-hour session during which the group will discuss students’ work. This runs over the two years. You can expect to attend a follow-up tutorial with your class tutor each time your work is discussed in the workshop.

There are currently three workshop groups of approximately ten students. Each group is assigned a tutor for the autumn semester, and a different tutor for the spring semester. Groups are ‘shuffled’ in December, so that you can encounter the widest range of peer responses to your work during the course. Teaching styles vary, but typically three students each week will have their work discussed by the group. The work in progress (typically 5,000 words) is circulated a week in advance, and annotated copies are returned to the student at the end of the session. The emphasis is always on constructive criticism, and the expectation is that the group will gain as much from the discussion as will the individual whose work is being discussed. You can expect your writing to be workshopped at least six times over the course of the two semesters.

In the second semester of the first year you will choose a second module from the broad range of seminar options available to you in the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing. These include Creative-Critical Writing, Ludic Literature and Theory and Practice of Fiction. In the second year you can take another optional module, choosing from a range that includes Criticism/Critique; The Art of Short Fiction; Fiction After Modernism; and The Writing of Crime/Thriller Fiction. (Some of these modules may not be available in certain years, if for example teaching faculty are on study leave.)

In the summer dissertation period you will also be assigned a supervisor for a series of four individual tutorials in which you will discuss your dissertation, which you’ll write independently over the summer vacation.

You are also required to attend the Research Methodology lecture series, which takes place in the latter half of the spring semester in year two. Most of our Creative Writing tutors give a lecture on their own working methods. You are also able to attend the undergraduate lecture series as these can help extend your awareness of the wider historical and conceptual context of your own writing.