MA Creative Writing

Programme overview

Entry requirements

• A bachelor's degree with a 2:1 (hons) in English literature or Creative Writing, or a degree scheme that includes a significant proportion of English Literature or Creative Writing content, or a related subject. Applicants will also submit a Creative Writing sample comprising approximately 1,000 words of prose or 3 pages of poetry (or a portfolio combining both genres). Applications from those with degrees in other subjects may be considered on an individual basis.
• IELTS 6.5 overall, with no less than 6.0 in all components.

Programme specification

The MA in Creative Writing offers students the opportunity to develop postgraduate skills in creative writing within the context of a School of English with a long and distinguished history in creative writing. The programme covers a range of literary forms, including poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction genres. The course develops students’ skills as creative practitioners and explores the history, generic conventions and experimental possibilities of creative literary forms.

The course is structured through a combination of core modules and option modules and culminates in the independent creative writing research project. Total credits required for the programme are 180 credits (3 modules per semester).

In semester 1, students take the core module Approaches to Creative Writing, which introduces students to the study of creative writing at MA level. In semester 2, they must take one of two options (they may choose to take both of these) titled Writing Prose Fiction and Writing Poetry, which immerse students in the creative practice of these genres and current debates in these fields. Students may further choose from two creative-critical options, The Long Poem, and Selves, Families, Stories, which develop students’ knowledge and practice in specialist forms of the long poem and memoir. And/or they may choose optional modules from a range of offerings in English Literature, alongside modules in digital media and performance in the School of Performance and Creative Industries.

The research project, which is the capstone of the programme, includes some plenary lectures in semester 1, once students have been prepared to begin independent research by the core module Approaches to Creative Writing. The research project module, which is the other core module for the programme, continues in semester 2 in the form of individual supervisions under specialist creative writing staff. During the summer students complete this independent project, with the goal of producing a single extended piece of creative writing, or a portfolio of creative writing, which may be developed further for publication. This goal is a key distinctive learning outcome of the programme.

The ‘creative writing workshop’ is at the heart of the pedagogy of the programme and is a distinctive learning and teaching method. The creative workshop embeds principles of the Leeds Curriculum by making students active partners in shaping their own, and their peers’, creative practice.

Year 1

[Learning Outcomes, Transferable (Key) Skills, Assessment]
View Timetable

Compulsory Modules

Candidates will be required to study the following compulsory modules:

Code	Title	Credits	Semester	Pass for Progression
ENGL5900M	Approaches to Creative Writing	30	Semester 1 (Sep to Jan)
ENGL5930M	Creative Writing Research Project	60	1 Dec to 30 Sep	PFP

Optional Modules

Basket 1: Candidates will be required to study at least 30 credits from the following optional modules (both may be taken):

Code	Title	Credits	Semester	Pass for Progression
ENGL5910M	Writing Poetry	30	Semester 2 (Jan to Jun)
ENGL5920M	Writing Prose Fiction	30	Semester 2 (Jan to Jun)

Basket 2: Candidates will be required to study a maximum of 60 credits from the following optional modules coded ENGLXXXM. Please note that this is an indicative module list, and a selection of options is offered each year depending on staff availability:

Code	Title	Credits	Semester	Pass for Progression
ENGL5100M	The Long Poem: Self, Land, Witness	30	Semester 1 (Sep to Jan)
ENGL5105M	Caribbean and Black British Writing	30	Semester 2 (Jan to Jun)
ENGL5117M	Romantic Identities: Literary Constructions of the Self, 1789-1821	30	Semester 2 (Jan to Jun)
ENGL5343M	Africas of the Mind	30	Semester 1 (Sep to Jan)
ENGL5345M	Reading (with) Psychoanalysis	30	Semester 1 (Sep to Jan)
ENGL5346M	So Where do you come from? Selves, Families, Stories	30	Semester 1 (Sep to Jan)
ENGL5530M	Fictional English and English Fictions	30	Semester 1 (Sep to Jan)
ENGL5540M	Thinking With the Contemporary Novel	30	Semester 2 (Jan to Jun)
ENGL5550M	Writing Places and Identities	30	Semester 1 (Sep to Jan)
ENGL5664M	Medical Humanities: Representing Illness, Disability, and Care	30	Semester 1 (Sep to Jan)
ENGL5665M	The Digital & English Studies	30	Semester 1 (Sep to Jan)
ENGL5666M	Ways of Reading: Novels in the Age of Information Excess	30	Semester 2 (Jan to Jun)
ENGL5722M	Writing about Death in Nineteenth-Century America	30	Not running in 202324
ENGL5737M	Postcolonialism, Animals and the Environment	30	Semester 2 (Jan to Jun)
ENGL5756M	Fictions of Citizenship in Contemporary American Literature	30	Semester 1 (Sep to Jan)
ENGL5817M	Shakespeare's Tyrants	30	Semester 2 (Jan to Jun)
ENGL5828M	Global Indigeneity	30	Semester 2 (Jan to Jun)
ENGL5830M	Apprentices to Life: The Nineteenth-Century Bildungsroman	30	Semester 2 (Jan to Jun)
ENGL5831M	Feeling Time	30	Not running in 202324
ENGL5834M	Romantic Ecologies	30	Semester 1 (Sep to Jan)
ENGL5846M	Literature and the Politics of Language	30	Semester 2 (Jan to Jun)
ENGL5847M	War, Mourning, Memory: 1914-1939	30	Semester 2 (Jan to Jun)
ENGL5860M	Turks, Moors, and Jews: Race and Identity in English Renaissance Drama	30	Semester 1 (Sep to Jan)
ENGL5940M	Planetary Aesthetics: Animism, Mimesis and Indigeneity	30	Semester 1 (Sep to Jan)
ENGL5950M	George Orwell: The Politics of Literature	30	Semester 1 (Sep to Jan)

Candidates may take up to 30 credits in approved MA level modules outside the School of English. Subject to approval from the Programme Leader, if a module from Basket 2 is NOT taken, a maximum of 30 credits may be taken from approved modules outside of the school such as those modules listed below:

Code	Title	Credits	Semester	Pass for Progression
PECI5407M	Digital and Intermedial Storytelling	30	Semester 2 (Jan to Jun)
PECI5409M	Script Development for Film and Television	30	Semester 2 (Jan to Jun)
PECI5411M	Arts Based Practices in Health and Wellbeing	30	Semester 2 (Jan to Jun)

Elective Modules

Last updated: 01/09/2023 11:11:23

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