Program Overview

Explore the urge to create and build new worlds, to share language and stories with others. On our course you will reflect on how literature shapes, and is shaped by the world, as well as honing the craft of writing through a multi-genre approach.

Drawing on key texts and ideas, you’ll develop critical thinking and creative problem-solving skills that will help you to make your own mark. To develop your own creative writing, we offer an unusual approach to the practice of writing, combing innovative and traditional methods in order to develop your writing skills and abilities to judge your work critically, while expanding your knowledge across different modes and genres.

On our four-year MLitSt Literature and 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;

• Writing an independent creative project
• Early Modern (16th and 17th century) literature
• Exploring the psychological foundations of creativity in relation to myth
• United States, Caribbean and Transatlantic literature
• Writing for radio and playwriting
• Poetic, contemporary and avant-garde and political writing

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

• Conducting research into Shakespeare
• Development of a novel plan, from research and concept-development, to plotting, character and structure
• Study of rare and antiquated books
• Poetic practice across experimental writing in poetry from the performative to the visual

At Essex we believe in radical, challenging and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of literature and while we take note of conventions, we’re not bound by them. We have 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.