Program Overview

Explore the urge to create and build new worlds, to share language and stories with others. On our course you work on the craft of writing through a multi-genre approach, through and across a variety of writings from fiction and poetry, to non-fiction, psychogeography, performance writing and beyond.

At Essex 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. In the Centre for Creative Writing we encourage a culture of experiment and creativity, enabling you to feel part of a community of writers.

Uncover the history and theories of writing practices through studying familiar as well as unfamiliar writings from Ovid’s Metamorphoses to Wordsworth, and Kae Tempest, as well as writers taking alternative approaches to text production, from contemporary revisionings of fairytales, to new nature writing, science fiction, and the experimental language play of the French Oulipo group.

You will enhance your skills by engaging with a range of techniques, practical exercises and creative approaches and opportunities, including:

• Discover how words and ideas move across the world and are transformed through translation
• Write an independent creative project developed over eight months in your final year
• Explore the psychological foundations of creativity in relation to myth
• Surrealism and Defamiliarisation
• Creative use of social media
• Writing for radio and playwriting

Essex has 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.

Placement year

When you arrive at Essex, you can decide whether you would like to combine your course with a placement year. You will be responsible for finding your placement, but with support and guidance provided by both your department and our Employability and Careers Centre.

If you complete a placement year you'll only pay 20% of your usual tuition fee to Essex for that year.