Creative Writing

Overview

The MA Creative Writing at the University of Essex encourages you to develop your writing by stepping outside your comfort zone and discovering the different approaches to verbal art that are possible today. This will invigorate your own practice, whether you are writing psychogeography, plays, novels, stories or something else. You will choose from a variety of modules, covering topics such as:

• Development of a novel plan, from research and concept-development, to plotting, character, and structure
• Experimental language play of the Oulipo group across the short story, autobiography, cartoons, cookery and theatre
• Psychogeography, writing about walking, place, landscape, history and the psychic environment

• Poetic practice across experimental writing in poetry from the performative to the visual

Your future

Many of our students have gone on to successfully publish their work, notable recent alumni including:

• Ida Løkås, who won a literary prize in Norway for The Beauty That Flows Past, securing a book deal
• Alexia Casale, whose novel Bone Dragon was published by Faber & Faber and subsequently featured on both the Young Adult Books of the Year 2013 list for The Financial Times, and The Independent’s Books of the year 2013: Children
• Elaine Ewart, graduate from our MA Wild Writing and PhD Creative Writing courses, placed second in the New Welsh Writing Awards 2015
• Patricia Borlenghi, the founder of Patrician Press, which has published works by a number of our alumni
• Petra McQueen, who has written for The Guardian and runs creative writing courses and is studying PhD Creative Writing in the Department