Creative Writing

Creative writing at degree level is about far more than the expression of personal feeling or the writing of entertaining stories. It is a serious intellectual and craft discipline that asks you to develop your voice, your technical range, and your capacity to read and revise your own work with the same critical attention you bring to the work of others. It draws on a long tradition of writers learning from writers, and on a body of craft knowledge about how fiction, poetry, drama, and non-fiction each make their effects on readers and audiences.

At Birkbeck this part-time programme allows you to develop your writing practice alongside other commitments, which suits many writers who already have professional or personal lives to sustain. You will have opportunities to experiment with and explore creative writing across a range of forms, including drama, poetry, fiction, screenwriting, and non-fiction, developing a versatile range of techniques as well as the more specialised skills of your primary genre. The programme is enriched by its location in Bloomsbury, central London, where Birkbeck sits at the heart of a neighbourhood with a remarkable literary and artistic history and close proximity to publishers, theatres, and the cultural life of one of the world's great cities.

You will be taught in small groups with a workshop culture that values honest, constructive response to work in progress, developing both your writing and your ability to articulate what makes writing succeed.

Graduates of creative writing programmes find careers in writing, editing, publishing, teaching, journalism, copywriting, and the broader cultural and media sector. The combination of craft development, critical reading, and sustained creative practice the degree builds is genuinely useful in any career requiring the ability to write with clarity, originality, and audience awareness. Many graduates also continue to postgraduate study in creative writing, and some develop careers as working writers alongside other professional roles.