Liverpool offers a stimulating environment to study Creative and Critical Writing thanks to our unique placement module at one of our partner institutions and our exicting programme of events. You will develop your skills and knowledge through a combination of creative engagement with prose and drama.
Introduction
The programme offers a unique placement module through which you will have the opportunity to gain practical experience as a writer in residence at one of the University of Liverpool’s partner institutions in the city. As a writer in residence in locations such as museums and galleries, you will be able to develop professional skills through activities such as writing in response to exhibitions, or running creative writing workshops.
Assessment will take the form of a portfolio consisting of creative work and reflections on the experience and requirements of the writer-in-residence role. Through core modules on contemporary prose and drama/screenwriting, you will develop your writing ability and professional awareness (i.e. submitting to agents, editorial pitches).
Liverpool offers a stimulating environment in which to study Creative and Critical Writing, thanks to its lively events calendar:
Including the Liverpool Literary Festival and literary events through the Centre for New and International Writing
The University’s connections to local literary partners such as the Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse
The presence of three AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinkers in the Department of English alone
Masterclasses with visiting writers such as the Hope Street Writer in Residence.
What you'll learn
How critically-informed creative practice engages with a global society, social justice, political and environmental issues and human rights
How creative and critical forms can complement one another
A greater theoretical understanding of matters pertaining to socially-engaged writing
How to develop your own distinctive approach to creative practice
How to enhance and refine your creative writing
An awareness of appropriate industry areas, gaining skills and confidence in approaching key figures such as agents and editors.
Course content
Discover what you'll learn, what you'll study, and how you'll be taught and assessed.
If you're able to study part-time, you'll
study the same modules as the full-time master's degree over a longer period, usually 24 months. You
can make studying work for you by arranging your personal schedule
around lectures and seminars which take place during the day. After you
complete all the taught modules, you will complete your final
dissertation or project and will celebrate your achievements
at graduation the following term.
Studying part-time means you can study alongside work or any
other life commitments. You will
study the same modules as the full-time master's degree over a longer period, usually 24 months. You
can make studying work for you by arranging your personal schedule
around lectures and seminars which take place during the day. After you
complete all the taught modules, you will complete your final
dissertation or project and will celebrate your achievements
at graduation the following term.
Semester one
You will take four compulsory modules in creative writing, and a mandatory dissertation. Your remaining credits will be made up of four optional modules, which may include an optional work experience placement.
Compulsory modules
Creative Writing I: The Social Text (ENGL792)
Credits: 15 /
Semester: semester 1
What role does the written word play in society? How can we use writing to voice opinions, shape debates and engage socially? On this module, you will develop your creative and critical skills, considering how they can blend in producing socially-engaged writing. With a focus on textual practice, you will study techniques and approaches related to a range of genres, including poetry, drama, fiction and non-fiction. Workshops will see discussions on texts tackling concepts such as race, gender, climate and class. Through digital technologies, new media and ideas of transextuality, you will think about how different platforms shape the ways in which we can produce socially-engaged texts. From questioning the ethics of lyric poetry to using archival material from the university’s Science Fiction Special Collection to imagine futures in response to contemporary issues, this module will explore textual practice as a vehicle for social justice.
Creative Writing Workshop 1 (ENGL790)
Credits: 15 /
Semester: semester 1
On Creative Writing Workshop I, you will develop your creative practice through detailed discussion of form, style and technique. Through small-group workshops, this module will give you the support to explore the opportunities available to you as a creative writer, building your own distinctive work. In workshops, you will learn to read as writers, learning from examples from a range of writers alongside identifying and communicating the strengths and weaknesses of your own work, as well as the work of your peers. On the module, you will be encouraged to read widely according to your creative interests and discuss briefly in each workshop what you have learned from these texts. Assessment will take the form of a creative portfolio (either 3000 words prose, 4-6 poems or 10-15 pages of drama) and a 1000 word reading-log, reflecting on how your reading has influenced your writing.
Creative Writing Dissertation (ENGL794)
Credits: 60 /
Semester: whole session
At the end of your MA in Creative and Critical Writing, you will submit a significant portfolio of writing in the form of either 14,000-15,000 words of prose, 70-80 pages of drama or 20-25 pages of poetry. Over the course of four one-to-one meetings with your supervisor, you will develop plans for a substantial piece of writing that will demonstrate your originality as a creative writer. This module is a culmination of previous modules studied on the MA, in which you will bring to bear the skills, knowledge and confidence you have developed over the course of the Master’s programme.
Optional modules
Genre Definitions (ENGL780)
Credits: 15 /
Semester: semester 1
How (and why) do we point at a story and say, “This is science fiction”, and what does such a gesture reveal about the genre and our own attitudes to its concerns? In this module, we will explore the territories that Science Fiction ranges over, historically and conceptually. From “A Planet Called Science Fiction” (weeks 1-4), which examines the space that science fiction marks out for itself, we will move into the complicated relationship that Science Fiction has with fantasy, and analyse the ways in which it has been sub-divided into various effects and sub-genres in “Travels in Genre Space” (week 5-8). The final section of the module, “Re-drawing the Genre Map” (weeks 9-12), explores the burgeoning field of sf production, its relevance to society, and the ways in which its tropes and techniques relate to other “fantastic” modes of literary production, alongside recent controversies in the field.
Literature and Crisis (ENGL771)
Credits: 15 /
Semester: semester 1
This module encourages students to read widely across the late 19th, 20th and 21st centuries with the specific angle of ‘crisis’. Topics may include literary responses to political, social, psychological, theological or climate crisis, aesthetic responses to moral or societal panic, war and migration/trauma, as well as any links between identity and crisis in literature and the visual (photography, film, fine art). Authors may include: Bessie Head; Jean-Paul Sartre; Virginia Woolf; Sarah Kane; Danez Smith; Solmaz Sharif among others. We will consider how the framing of crisis as a moment or event shapes how we think about chronologies of literary response and its social uses. The module will be delivered via six fortnightly seminars.
Science Fiction and/as The Archive (ENGL781)
Credits: 15 /
Semester: semester 1
Science Fiction texts are, for all their presentations of alternative worlds, deeply embedded in the cultures that produce them. Using examples from the Science Fiction Foundation Collection and science fiction archives in the University Library, this module introduces students to skills of archival research alongside providing the knowledge required to understand how modern Science Fiction developed as a unique interaction of authors, editors, and readers. Alongside this, students will read selected sf texts that consider or reflect upon the notion of the archive and/or which reveal themselves to be “archival” texts through their relationship to their contemporary period. Although texts may vary year-by-year, indicative authors include Margaret Atwood, Alastair Reynolds, Olaf Stapledon, and John Wyndham.
The Body (ENGL773)
Credits: 15 /
Semester: semester 2
This module focuses on theories of the body in contemporary critical thought and in modern and contemporary literature using relevant theory to support readings of a range of literary texts. We will study politically informed theories such as critical race studies, feminist, queer and disability studies and topics such as the maternal body, the body in pain and the ageing body. In all these cases the body emerges as a concept marked by internal division in terms of sex, gender, age, size, and race. We will study bodies as organisms and bodies as social phenomena, exploring the tension between the body’s material manifestations and its sites of immateriality such as the mind, spirit, psyche and affect.
The Modern (ENGL770)
Credits: 15 /
Semester: semester 1
This module encourages students to engage with literary modernism in a range of contexts, from the cities in which it was made to the periodicals in which it was published and the theories that contributed to its development. As well as analysing the formal innovations of modernist literature, students will explore connections between writers, texts, works of visual art, geographic locations and mass culture, to understand modernism as a global network of people, objects, places and ideas. Conceptions of modernity will be studied, including approaches to the past and tradition, and ideas around novelty and fashion. Authors may include: T.S. Eliot, Hope Mirrlees, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes, Jean Toomer and Nancy Cunard.
Programme details and modules listed are illustrative only and subject to change.
Semester two
Compulsory modules
Creative Writing II: The Social Voice (ENGL793)
Credits: 15 /
Semester: semester 2
What is a voice? What does it mean to write for or with a voice? How can we use our voice to engage with concepts of social justice? On this module you will consider approaches to crafting voices through writing in range of genres, including poetry, drama, fiction and non-fiction. You will explore what it means to use voice(s) to produce socially-engaged work and how different literary and performative modes can use voice. In seminars, you will discuss the work of dramatists, poets, fiction writers and theorists, considering how creative and critical voices can combine to produce different modes of writing. You will consider how different media and spaces – such as performance spaces and podcasts – can be used to disseminate writing, thinking about the interactions between page and voice, and between creative and critical approaches. Working with your tutors, you will produce socially-engaged writing intended for performance, exploring various opportunities on offer for poetry, drama and prose.
Creative Writing Workshop II (ENGL791)
Credits: 15 /
Semester: semester 2
On Creative Writing Workshop II, you will continue to develop your creative practice through detailed discussion of form, style and technique, building on the work undertaken in Creative Writing Workshop I. Through small-group workshops, this module will give you the support to explore further opportunities available to you as a creative writer, developing your writing with a view towards your Dissertation. In workshops, you will continue to become increasingly adept at identifying and communicating the strengths and weaknesses of your own work, as well as the work of your peers. You will enhance your awareness of contemporary literature and develop your professional skills by researching key industry figures/institutions appropriate to your writing. Assessment will take the form of a creative portfolio (either 3000 words prose, 4-6 poems or 10-15 pages of drama) and a mock 1000 word pitch to an industry figure (i.e. agent, commissioning editor, producer, etc.).
Creative Writing Dissertation (ENGL794)
Credits: 60 /
Semester: whole session
At the end of your MA in Creative and Critical Writing, you will submit a significant portfolio of writing in the form of either 14,000-15,000 words of prose, 70-80 pages of drama or 20-25 pages of poetry. Over the course of four one-to-one meetings with your supervisor, you will develop plans for a substantial piece of writing that will demonstrate your originality as a creative writer. This module is a culmination of previous modules studied on the MA, in which you will bring to bear the skills, knowledge and confidence you have developed over the course of the Master’s programme.
Optional modules
Bodies in Space (ENGL783)
Credits: 15 /
Semester: semester 2
The philosopher Rosi Braidotti tells us that science fiction unfolds social imaginaries that reveal to us our potential to metamorphose, to mutate to become posthuman, while Donna Haraway urges us to embrace our cyborg identities. Such new materialist thinking shapes this module. To borrow from Karen Barad, what we’re interested in here is how ‘matter itself is diffracted’; how are different kinds of bodies – human and non-human, gendered, raced, classed, aged, prosthetic, engineered, planetary – materialized and sedimented according to the various spaces in which they find themselves. These spaces can be bewilderingly diverse in science fiction: from the hyper-urban to the rural, from the aquatic to the aerial, from high to zero gravity, from confined spacecraft quarters to the hostile expanses of desert planets. We’ll explore representations of gender, race and religion, with particular attention to the ways in which bodies become vulnerable or empowered, protected or miscegenated. And we’ll also address the ethical and practical concerns of exploration, immigration, colonization and cultural imperialism, all the while with an eye to theories of embodiment that take us far beyond binary thought into new forms of becoming.
Fictions of Technology (ENGL782)
Credits: 15 /
Semester: semester 2
This module examines texts from a variety of historical periods, interrogating the role that technology plays within them. After setting up some of the initial concerns of the module regarding technology, and the relationship between literature and technology, we will situate our reading within three broad topic areas: Technologies Across Time, Humanity & Technology, and The Uneven Distribution of the Future.
The Contemporary (ENGL772)
Credits: 15 /
Semester: semester 2
This module asks students to consider the question ‘What is the Contemporary?’. How can literature help us to understand our sense of ‘the now’ and locate us in the present? And what does it have to tell us about our past and our future? These enquiries take in a series of literary and critical positions on matters of ‘the present’ and ‘contemporariness’ as explored through literature and theory. Over a series of seminars, students will be required to conceptualise and understand the different ways that we can understand the idea of the contemporary, contemporaneousness as a historical term and as a term of theoretical discourse.
Victorian Apocalypse (ENGL764)
Credits: 15 /
Semester: semester 2
How we imagine the end of the world tells us not only what we fear, but what we value – the study of apocalypse is not simply a study of endings, it is a study of revelation. The Victorians had every reason to be pre-occupied with the apocalypse: theirs was a culture facing the advent of new technologies, a changed experience of time, shifts in religious belief, and profound ecological concerns. On this module, we will study a range of Victorian apocalyptic texts across a range of forms and genres (both historical and literary), and we will consider the contexts and controversies from which they emerge. Lively discussions about what the end of the world meant to the Victorians, and what it still means to us, are at the heart of this module.
Work Experience Placement (ENGL795)
Credits: 15 /
Semester: semester 2
This module is an opportunity for you to undertake a placement in a setting which matches your writing and possible career/industry interests, develop materials and/or undertake tasks within a practical or vocational context, apply creative and/or academic knowledge from your degree, and develop your personal and employability skills within a working environment.
Programme details and modules listed are illustrative only and subject to change.
Final project
During the summer you will complete a dissertation.
Compulsory modules
Creative Writing Dissertation (ENGL794)
Credits: 60 /
Semester: whole session
At the end of your MA in Creative and Critical Writing, you will submit a significant portfolio of writing in the form of either 14,000-15,000 words of prose, 70-80 pages of drama or 20-25 pages of poetry. Over the course of four one-to-one meetings with your supervisor, you will develop plans for a substantial piece of writing that will demonstrate your originality as a creative writer. This module is a culmination of previous modules studied on the MA, in which you will bring to bear the skills, knowledge and confidence you have developed over the course of the Master’s programme.
Programme details and modules listed are illustrative only and subject to change.
How you'll learn
Teaching is delivered through a combination of seminars and tutorials held on campus. Depending on which module options are taken, there may be lectures and separate seminar sessions scheduled, but all classes will take place on campus in person. Class sizes for Masters programmes in the Department of English tend to be small, and a typical class in English will include between 8-10 students.
How you're assessed
Students will for the most part be assessed by a combination of formative and summative coursework. This will take a number of different forms, including essays, essay plans, research proposals, and a dissertation. In addition, students will be assessed by presentations in certain modules. Other assessment formats may apply also depending on the options modules taken.
Liverpool Hallmarks
We have a distinctive approach to education, the Liverpool Curriculum Framework, which focuses on research-connected teaching, active learning, and authentic assessment to ensure our students graduate as digitally fluent and confident global citizens.
Your experience
The Department of English is based in the School of the Arts. We are committed to small group teaching, which encourages a more rewarding learning experience, where ideas are shared and explored with your peers and supervisors. You will be part of a genuine international postgraduate community. You will be able to participate in our lively research culture through attending regular seminars and lectures by guest speakers as well as our own staff and students.
Support for students with differing needs from the Disability advice and guidance team. They can identify and recommend appropriate support provisions for you.
An exciting place to study English
We are internationally renowned for advancing the study of language, literature, and creative writing and have a strong research ethos
Our programmes offer opportunities to study creative writing and literature from a wide range of periods, as well as a range of approaches to understanding the way in which the English language works
We have a reputation for radical thinking, as exemplified by our success rate in the BBC and Arts and Humanities Council’s ‘New Generation Thinkers’ scheme. In total, five members our academic staff have been selected since the scheme was established in 2010
We are committed to small group teaching. This encourages a more rewarding learning experience, where ideas are shared and explored with peers and tutors
Ranked 10th in sector for research impact classified as outstanding (4*) (REF 2021)
We are host to Europe’s largest collection of science fiction materials which includes the John Wyndham Archive and home to the annual Liverpool Literary Festival.
The course emphasises both creative and critical practice, so graduates will be able to demonstrate a broad range of skills to potential employers. The placement module will offer employability skills and career opportunities through professional experience as a writer in residence embedded in a partner institution.
There will also be opportunities for you to gain employability skills in the running of literary events through the Centre for New and International Writing and the Liverpool Literary Festival, in addition to honing performance skills through the annual student showcase.
Career support from day one to graduation and beyond
This course will allows you to develop your writing, research and creative thinking skills. You’ll also gain skills that are useful in a range of other careers such as:
Publishing
Marketing
PR
Teaching
Copywriting
Creative director
Editorial roles
Fees and funding
Your tuition fees, funding your studies, and other costs to consider.
Tuition fees
UK fees (applies to Channel Islands, Isle of Man and Republic of Ireland)
Full-time place, per year
£10,150
Part-time place, per year
£5,075
International fees
Full-time place, per year
£21,400
Part-time place, per year
£10,700
Fees stated are for the 2023-24 academic year.
Tuition fees cover the cost of your teaching and assessment, operating facilities such as libraries, IT equipment, and access to academic and personal support.
We understand that budgeting for your time at university is important, and we want to make sure you understand any course-related costs that are not covered by your tuition fee. This could include buying a laptop, books, or stationery.
You will normally need a 2:1 honours degree, or above, or equivalent. This degree should preferably be in a relevant subject, such as English Literature or Creative Writing.
Applicants with honours degrees in other subjects will be considered on an individual basis and may be invited for interview.
As part of the application process, irrespective of your degree subject, you should:
Submit a sample of your creative writing – either 2,000-3,000 words in prose, 3-4 poems, or 8-12 pages of a drama script.
Write briefly, in a personal statement, on the writers whose work you admire, as well as the kind of writing you wish to pursue.
International qualifications
If you hold a bachelor’s degree or equivalent, but don’t meet our entry requirements, a Pre-Master’s can help you gain a place. This specialist preparation course for postgraduate study is offered on campus at the University of Liverpool International College, in partnership with Kaplan International Pathways. Although there’s no direct Pre-Master’s route to this MA, completing a Pre-Master’s pathway can guarantee you a place on many other postgraduate courses at The University of Liverpool.
Liverpool bursts with diversity and creativity which makes it ideal for you to undertake your postgraduate studies and access various opportunities for you and your family.
To fully immerse yourself in the university experience living in halls will keep you close to campus where you can always meet new people. Find your home away from home.
Discover what expenses are covered by the cost of your tuition fees and other finance-related information you may need regarding your studies at Liverpool.
Contact us
Have a question about this course or studying with us? Our dedicated enquiries team can help.
