Program Overview

University is a time to develop your own subject-specific knowledge and learning in-depth while also gaining the key skills you need to get ahead in the jobs marketplace.

Creative and Professional Writing gives you the opportunity to grow as a thinker and creator through the medium of the written word in its myriad forms, while honing your writing and critical thinking skills to the highest degree.

Creative writing anthology:
We publish an anthology of work submitted by our Creative and Professional Writing students every spring. Read the anthology.

Why St Mary's?
Our goal on the St Mary’s Creative and Professional Writing programme is threefold:

• To help students develop into the writers they want to be
• To hone the core writing skills that will give them an entry into jobs marketplace in the creative and many other industries
• To give them a general introduction to the diverse publishing world and literary scene in the UK and beyond

There's no snobbery in the teaching of creative writing at St Mary’s. We're open to all kinds of writers with a wide array of interests, from science fiction to screenplays and from rap to romance. We recognise that the way we read and write is changing, and we try to reflect new developments, from social media to video game writing. You tell us what you want to write and we will help you to write it as well as you can.

In the Creative and Professional Writing programme we expect you to read and write. A lot. We give students regular writing exercises to guide them towards their assignments, and we encourage wide reading.

Most of the set texts on the course are contemporary – from the last 20 years – so that students learn how people are writing now. Much of what they read is very recent. We want our students to be up to date on what is happening in the creative writing world now.

At St Mary's we are friendly and supportive and get to know our students very well. We operate an open door policy in the department, and are always ready to meet students to discuss their writing and their reading inside and outside the course. There is a lively Professional and Creative Arts Society, and regular informal reading evenings, where students share work with each other.

Our teachers are all practising, published novelists, poets and writers. There are fantasy and horror writing experts, acclaimed book critics and literary novelists, international journalists and TV scriptwriters.

About the Foundation Year:
Our four-year degree programmes (including a foundation year) provide an alternative route to undergraduate study at university if you do not have the grades to access higher education in the traditional way.
On successful completion of the Humanities Foundation Year pathway you will progress on to the three-year undergraduate degree in Creative and Professional Writing.