Both in workshops and through independent study, you will explore a wide range of short-form writing, including a variety of modes: international strict form poetry (e.g., sonnet, rondeau, terza rima, ghazal, villanelle, sestina), free verse, flash fiction, and historical flash fiction. Ethical questions about combining fact and fiction are addressed in an introduction to historical fiction. You may also explore review writing in real-world contexts and digital short-form writing on social media platforms, enhancing your transferable employability skills.

The focus on short-form writing across various genres enables you to develop clarity of expression and conciseness while practising redrafting and editing, building your confidence as a writer. A range of exercises will generate new writing. You will give one another formative feedback, and evaluate the responses your work receives, providing structured opportunities to consolidate writing skills for your final submissions.

Assessment: Collaborative Writing (20%) and Short Form Portfolio (80%)

This module focuses on journeys and places, offering the chance to explore key concepts underpinning your studies. You will take a post-disciplinary approach, using techniques from diverse areas to address questions related to journeys and places.

Interactive lectures with students from across the School of Humanities and Performing Arts provide opportunities to apply these concepts in subject-specific workshops and assessments.

Themes may include journeys, spaces, and the concept of welcome; (im)mobilities and journeys through time and space; representation and imaginative geographies; gender and placemaking; belonging and place attachment; and sustainability and the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Assessment: Subject-specific Coursework 1 (30%) and Coursework 2 (70%)

This module explores how traditional texts and digital innovations can improve your writing practice. Through core readings, including work from global majority writers and translations, you will develop craft skills in voice, form, structure, and genre. A key aim of the module is to help you optimise your growth as a writer in the digital sphere.

In addition to producing creative work, you will work individually or collaboratively in a ‘writers’ salon’. You will lead discussions, select material, and devise writing activities, consolidating your learning and employability skills, particularly in educational settings.

Assessment: Writers' Salon (20%) and Portfolio (80%)

This year-long module develops your writing practice, focusing on your existing creative projects. You’ll plan, research, and develop these projects effectively, learning the importance of constructive feedback. Key activities include workshopping, character development, and place writing techniques.

Assessment: Feedback Report (20%) and Creative Work & Reflective Commentary (80%)

This module explores the negotiation of identity in writing as potential material for the creative writer. It involves exploring the identities of the fictional characters created by authors, and your own identity as a writer and creative thinker.

You will engage with a wide range of fictional, biographical, autobiographical, poetic, and theoretical material. As well as exploring memoir, biography and other forms of non-fiction, you will also explore the ways in which the raw material of memory, observation, experience and an informed imagination might contribute to producing poetry, fiction and essays. You might also choose to write about you own experiences of identity, exploring selfhood, personality, memory, and examining the degree to which any written identity has a fictional component. Implicitly, you will engage in critical, ethical and moral debates centred around identity in the twenty-first century.

You will consider the responsibility of writers to represent groups or individuals with care and intelligence, particularly in relation to equality, diversity and inclusivity (EDI). Teaching delivery will embed discussions of identity in relation to issues such as place, race, gender and class, particularly the formation of postcolonial identities, and the role of intersectionality in the construction and negotiation of identity.

Assessment: Writing Identity Portfolio (100%)

This module is designed to prepare and support you towards the pursuit of post-degree pathways. You will focus on the specific skills, capabilities and knowledge needed to adapt and flourish in professional environments and contexts. There will be an emphasis on enhancement of core attributes, competencies and transferable skills as well as developing familiarity with the world and politics of work. The module will prepare you for diverse and dynamic working environments beyond university and support your long-term professional development.

You will be introduced to the UN Sustainable Development Goals and invited to engage critically around themes including race, gender, identity, and geopolitical issues, to conceptualize a more equitable society, and environmentally sustainable world, as relevant to your career aspirations.

You will engage with subject-specific workshops to gain greater understanding of worlds of work connected to English language and linguistics. You will take part in lectures, seminars, group discussion, independent learning, tutorial support and engagement with your peers.

Supported independent learning activities may include responding to real-world briefs, placements/shadowing, engagement with community projects or initiatives, creating proposals for projects or initiatives in a professional setting. These activities will be tailored to your programme.

Assessment: Written Portfolio or Recorded Presentation (100%)

This module’s focus is story in the broadest sense - a subject with relevance in forms as diverse as poetry, hypertext, and all scripted work. Narrative remains a tremendously powerful tool in all aspects of media, in marketing, advertising, gaming, as well as all aspects of fiction. Main themes may include narrative arcs and structures, characterisation, pace, event, story-world, dialogue, clue-laying, revelation, and concealment, and means of involving the reader.

Initially, the module will focus on storytelling and prose, looking at story structure, narrative structure, and drive, and how writers compel us to turn the pages. It will consider how the art of storytelling has adapted to its contemporary setting and the relationship between form and content. You will gain skills and craft techniques to use in your wider creative practice.

On occasions, additional specialist study may include an exploration of story craft in other forms, genres, and cultures, for example, writing for stage and screen, both TV and film, but with a particular focus on structure and narrative.

You may use storyboarding and electronic forms of presentation (e.g., Padlet, Pecha Kucha) as learning tools. You will be expected to undertake analytical reading and practical creative tasks.

Assessment: Story Craft Proposal (40%) and Story Craft Creative Work (60%)

This year-long module builds upon the skills developed in Shaping Ideas at level 4. It is therefore part of a pathway dedicated to the planning for, and management of, longer projects that culminates in the level 6 dissertation. Through in-depth study of form and wide-ranging research, you will explore how word, image and sound might be placed in creative dialogue in a variety of writing contexts.

This may include writing as varied as ekphrastic poetry, poetry films, podcasting, screenplays, comics, graphic novels, radio drama, hypertext, and audio-visual work. The module may also examine the impact of global new media and the international digital environment on contemporary writing practices. You will choose one of the forms taught in that year for your research and develop creative work informed by that research.

Workshops will provide a supportive and constructive environment as you begin to work on longer projects involving research. You will be introduced to ways of working, for example journal-keeping, that will prepare you for the level 6 dissertation. It is important in this module that you begin to develop your projects outside of the taught content and engage in targeted independent research.

The unifying theme of this module is writing for screens and with screens. In this module, you will develop skills in writing for a range of screen genres and platforms with a focus on optimising your writing practice in the 21st century writing and publishing context. Writing for and with screens provides the contemporary writer with an opportunity to revitalise creative processes, such as drafting, editing, publishing, reading and researching. Screen genres considered may include podcast, poetry films, TV and/or film scripts; web novels; flash fiction forms attached to different social media platforms; games.

You will also engage in collaborative work that replicates real-world writing contexts, for example an episode for TV sitcom, a collaboratively written web novel, or flash fiction collection for online publication.

Assessment: Screentime Reflection (30%) and Screentime Project (70%)

This module provides you with a range of appropriate professional skills and knowledge of the writing industry in its global context. Although some will be specific to the needs of creative writing practitioners, the knowledge and employability skills you gain will also be an advantage in a range of career options. Thus, it encompasses enterprise and entrepreneurship education by enabling you to develop the specific skills, capabilities and knowledge needed to adapt and flourish in different professional environments and contexts.

Topics may include discussions of international publishing trends, copyright, digital marketing, the selling of translation rights, developments in e-publishing, the global phenomenon of print-on-demand, and self-publishing. Provision may include contributions from industry professionals with a range of international links, for example, talks from visiting professors, independent publishers, or industry professionals.

This is a highly complex and successful module, that is annually singled out for praise from the external examiner.

Assessment: Marketing Plan (30%) and Publication Project (70%)

This module encourages you to rethink the premise of ‘Creative Writing’ as self-expression. It will heighten your attention to the language that surrounds them in everyday life and involve an element of self-transformation in your attitudes towards relations between art and life.

Creative Writing is founded upon notions of ‘original’ composition, and the quest to find a ‘unique’ voice. The ability to generate new writing that expresses creative thought and reflects upon experiences is one of the enduring definitions of what it means to be human. But there is an alternative, playful, history of ‘Uncreative Writing’ that challenges these ideas and welcomes kinds of writing practice open to celebrating the ‘materiality’ of language, chance procedures, collage, ‘conceptual writing’, ‘found’ and ‘appropriated’ texts, and experiments with artificial constraints.

This alternate history is multi-disciplinary, and this module brings you into dialogue with a range of ideas, attitudes and practices that have been central to visual art, musical composition, mathematics, and Zen.

Key to the module is a celebration of the importance of play and experimentation as central tenets of creativity. You will be supported to develop a receptivity towards the creative resources of everyday life, and a willingness to transform everyday materials.

Assessment: Uncreative Portfolio (100%)

The final-year dissertation module provides you with an opportunity to work at length in a single form or genre of your choice. The aim is to produce professionally presented independent creative work. The precise composition of the dissertation will be negotiated with your tutor in accordance with departmental guidelines and must include written creative work accompanied by a critical reflective essay. You are expected to consider your own work in relation to current published work in the same and related genres.

You will be supported to learn from feedback, to edit, redraft and rethink your work. Working with a supervisor and response group, you will respond to feedback and provide feedback constructively over a longer period, mirroring more closely a real-world writing context. Working with others to manage your response groups and keeping your own records of supervision meetings will help you to develop skills which are of value in the workplace.

You will be managing a professional writing project from conception to completion; thus, the module also supports you to develop specific skills, capabilities and knowledge to adapt in different professional environments and contexts.

Assessment: Concept Testing (20%) and Dissertation (80%)