Integrated Master in Literature: Creative Writing

You are inspired by the world around you, and you want to capture it in words. You are good at telling stories, and you like to experiment with form and language, creating new worlds to share with your reader. On our course you will hone your creative and writing skills across a wide variety of genres from fiction and poetry to non-fiction, psycho-geography, script and performance writing – and beyond.

At Essex we offer an unusual approach to the practice of writing, combing innovative and traditional methods in order to help you develop your writing skills and the abilities to judge your work, and that of others, critically. Learn how to give and receive feedback, through workshopping and development processes. Step outside your comfort zone and discover new and different approaches to verbal art.

On the four-year MLitSt Creative Writing, you will be part of an interdisciplinary department and well-established home to practising poets, dramatists, novelists and critics.

You have the flexibility to choose from a wide range of optional modules across different topics and areas of specialism, including;

• Dreaming and Writing
• The Writer's toolkit and writing short stories
• Creative non-fiction
• An introduction to screenwriting
• Writing Science Fiction
• Writing audio drama and playwriting for theatre
• Narrative and film
• Journalism and storytelling

In your fourth year, as a post-graduate student, you will be able to choose from the following masters level creative writing topics;

• Development of a novel plan, from research and concept-development, to plotting, character and structure
• Experimental language play
• Psychogeography, writing about walking, place, landscape, history and psychic environment
• Poetic practice across experimental writing in poetry from the performative to the visual

Essex has nurtured a long tradition of distinguished writers whose work has shaped literature as we know it today, from past giants such as the American poets Robert Lowell and Ted Berrigan, to contemporary writers such as mythographer and novelist Dame Marina Warner, and Booker Prize winner Ben Okri.

Our course offers a varied, flexible and distinctive curriculum, focused on developing your abilities as a writer, while allowing you to take options from the other courses within our Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies including literature, filmmaking, journalism and drama.

A typical timetable involves a one-hour lecture and a one-hour seminar or a two-hour seminar for each module every week, but there are variations in place depending on the module.