Postgraduate Taught

The Keele MA in Creative Writing offers a distinctive and exciting opportunity to develop your creative and professional skills as a writer.

Working with published writers from within and outside the University, the Keele Writing MA offers participants an opportunity to improve their writing and to bring it up to publishable standard while learning more about the critical and intellectual context in which their work is situated.

Students on the Keele Writing MA also participate directly in the development and maintenance of the events, publications, workshops and short courses which constitute Keele’s vibrant writing culture – typically through opting to gain experience in one of the areas in which writers often establish a secondary income – reviewing, editing and teaching.

You can study full-time or part-time for this MA. It is also possible to take short courses in Creative Writing, delivered as part of our MA programme, as well as Certificate and Diploma-level courses in the subject.

• To provide opportunities for the practice and study of creative writing at an advanced, publishable level
• To provide a supportive and constructively critical environment in which students can work with published writers and their peers to improve their writing
• To provide students with the necessary skills to write at an advanced, publishable level

Applicants will normally be expected to have a good honours degree (normally 2.2 or above). They will be required to submit a portfolio of work to the admissions tutor (usually the Programme Director). A high quality portfolio will take precedence over a first degree and may be taken as evidence of APEL. The portfolio should consist of 10-15 poems and/ or 5,000-6,000 words of prose. If it is considered of sufficient quality, the admissions tutor will pass it on to one of the creative writing tutors specialising in the genre chosen by the applicant. That tutor will then recommend an interview, on which the final decision will be based. Up to 30 credits from a comparable programme may be taken as APCL.

The course is delivered as three stand-alone taught modules. In addition students complete a portfolio of original work. Students will have the opportunity to take any single module as a short course or to combine two modules and be awarded a Postgraduate Certificate (60 credits) or to complete four modules and receive a Postgraduate Diploma (120 credits)

The contents of each module are summarised below.

The core module The Writer as Critic, The Critic as Writer looks at questions of influence, the critical process of reading other writers’ work and the cultural context in which a writer lives and works. Students will study contemporary examples of script, poetry and fiction. Writing Fiction will be a workshop-based module on writing short fiction and novels. Writing Poetry will be a workshop-based module on writing poetry. Teaching Creative Writing will be a module focusing on the pedagogy of creative writing designed for those who wish to teach creative writing.

The writing modules are assessed by a portfolio of work and a critical commentary that reflects on the contents of the portfolio. The core module is assessed by written assignments and a presentation.