MFA Creative Writing

The first year of this course is coterminous with our MA Creative Writing Prose Fiction, offering you all the benefits of the workshop-based approach to teaching writing. The second year is structured on the model of the PhD, offering you one-to-one supervision of your work. Finally, you will submit a full-length piece of work for assessment.

In the autumn and spring semesters of your first year, you will attend the weekly workshop and an accompanying optional module. Your work will be peer-reviewed six times in the workshop, and on each occasion this will be followed by a one-to-one tutorial with your workshop tutor. In these follow-on individual meetings there will be an opportunity to discuss your work and your ambitions for your writing in greater detail.

Your optional module may also be practice-based, offering further opportunities to submit creative work in a critical context, or may be chosen from the full range of scholarly and critical modules offered in the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing. These include Criticism/Critique; Fiction After Modernism; Theory and Practice of Fiction; and Creative-Critical Writing. In the post-Easter dissertation period you will be assigned an individual supervisor for a series of one-to-one tutorials, and will attend a series of weekly presentations from visiting agents and publishers.

The second year is taught on the model of the PhD and comprises a series of eleven individual tutorials with your supervisor to discuss your work in progress. These meetings will allow your supervisor to provide constructive editorial feedback on your work in progress and answer any questions you may have. In the autumn semester you will also follow a course of teaching training, supplemented by classroom observation, and in the spring you will be offered an opportunity to assist in the teaching of the undergraduate Creative Writing programme.

Including workshops, tutorials and the double-marking of assignments, your work will be read and commented upon by faculty members around 35 times over the course of the MFA. There will often also be opportunities to show your work to visiting writers, such as our UNESCO professors, who have recently included the novelists Ali Smith, Margaret Atwood and Ian Rankin.