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Both in workshops and through independent study, you will explore a wide range of short-form writing, including a variety of modes: international strict form poetry (e.g., sonnet, rondeau, terza rima, ghazal, villanelle, sestina), free verse, flash fiction, and historical flash fiction. Ethical questions about combining fact and fiction are addressed in an introduction to historical fiction. You may also explore review writing in real-world contexts and digital short-form writing on social media platforms, enhancing your transferable employability skills.

The focus on short-form writing across various genres enables you to develop clarity of expression and conciseness while practising redrafting and editing, building your confidence as a writer. A range of exercises will generate new writing. You will give one another formative feedback, and evaluate the responses your work receives, providing structured opportunities to consolidate writing skills for your final submissions.

Assessment: Collaborative Writing (20%) and Short Form Portfolio (80%)

This module focuses on journeys and places, offering the chance to explore key concepts underpinning your studies. You will take a post-disciplinary approach, using techniques from diverse areas to address questions related to journeys and places.

Interactive lectures with students from across the School of Humanities and Performing Arts provide opportunities to apply these concepts in subject-specific workshops and assessments.

Themes may include journeys, spaces, and the concept of welcome; (im)mobilities and journeys through time and space; representation and imaginative geographies; gender and placemaking; belonging and place attachment; and sustainability and the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Assessment: Subject-specific Coursework 1 (30%) and Coursework 2 (70%)

In this module, you will develop performance skills relevant to chosen theatrical texts. Through analysing both linguistic and narrative structures of plays, you will explore critical and technical perspectives. Practical workshops will guide your exploration, consolidating knowledge through creative practice and collaboration.

Assessment: Solo Performance or Presentation (60%) and Essay (40%)

This year-long module develops your writing practice, focusing on your existing creative projects. You’ll plan, research, and develop these projects effectively, learning the importance of constructive feedback. Key activities include workshopping, character development, and place writing techniques.

Assessment: Feedback Report (20%) and Creative Work & Reflective Commentary (80%)

This module develops your skills in theatre and performance making, exploring approaches like directing and physical theatre. Critical analysis of performance texts and independent research are key components.

Assessment: Performance (70%) and Reflective Viva or Essay (30%)

This module prepares you for post-degree pathways by focusing on the skills, capabilities, and knowledge needed to thrive in professional environments. Emphasis is placed on core attributes and transferable skills while developing familiarity with the world of work.

You will critically engage with themes such as race, gender, identity, and geopolitical issues in relation to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, conceptualizing a more equitable and sustainable society.

Through workshops, lectures, seminars, and independent learning, you will explore work environments connected to creative writing and related fields. Activities may include responding to real-world briefs, placements, community projects, and creating project proposals.

Assessment: Written Portfolio or Recorded Presentation (100%)

This module’s focus is story in the broadest sense - a subject with relevance in forms as diverse as poetry, hypertext, and all scripted work. Narrative remains a tremendously powerful tool in all aspects of media, in marketing, advertising, gaming, as well as all aspects of fiction. Main themes may include narrative arcs and structures, characterisation, pace, event, story-world, dialogue, clue-laying, revelation, and concealment, and means of involving the reader.

Initially, the module will focus on storytelling and prose, looking at story structure, narrative structure, and drive, and how writers compel us to turn the pages. It will consider how the art of storytelling has adapted to its contemporary setting and the relationship between form and content. You will gain skills and craft techniques to use in your wider creative practice.

On occasions, additional specialist study may include an exploration of story craft in other forms, genres, and cultures, for example, writing for stage and screen, both TV and film, but with a particular focus on structure and narrative.

You may use storyboarding and electronic forms of presentation (e.g., Padlet, Pecha Kucha) as learning tools. You will be expected to undertake analytical reading and practical creative tasks.

Assessment: Story Craft Proposal (40%) and Story Craft Creative Work (60%)

In this module, you’ll work as part of a theatre company to stage a performance. The process involves realising a production, from initial research to final performance. You’ll gain valuable experience in ensemble work, performance skills, and the technical and creative demands of theatre.

Assessment: Creative Project (70%) and Reflective Viva (30%)

The unifying theme of this module is writing for screens and with screens. In this module, you will develop skills in writing for a range of screen genres and platforms with a focus on optimising your writing practice in the 21st century writing and publishing context. Writing for and with screens provides the contemporary writer with an opportunity to revitalise creative processes, such as drafting, editing, publishing, reading and researching. Screen genres considered may include podcast, poetry films, TV and/or film scripts; web novels; flash fiction forms attached to different social media platforms; games.

You will also engage in collaborative work that replicates real-world writing contexts, for example an episode for TV sitcom, a collaboratively written web novel, or flash fiction collection for online publication.

Assessment: Screentime Reflection (30%) and Screentime Project (70%)

This module provides you with a range of appropriate professional skills and knowledge of the writing industry in its global context. Although some will be specific to the needs of creative writing practitioners, the knowledge and employability skills you gain will also be an advantage in a range of career options. Thus, it encompasses enterprise and entrepreneurship education by enabling you to develop the specific skills, capabilities and knowledge needed to adapt and flourish in different professional environments and contexts.

Topics may include discussions of international publishing trends, copyright, digital marketing, the selling of translation rights, developments in e-publishing, the global phenomenon of print-on-demand, and self-publishing. Provision may include contributions from industry professionals with a range of international links, for example, talks from visiting professors, independent publishers, or industry professionals.

This is a highly complex and successful module, that is annually singled out for praise from the external examiner.

Assessment: Marketing Plan (30%) and Publication Project (70%)

This module explores cabaret performance from a practical perspective, examining how theatre can address politics and emancipate communities. You’ll engage with political activism through performance, using intersectional perspectives—race, gender, sexuality, class, and disability—to create work beyond entertainment.

Assessment: Performance (60%) and Essay/Presentation (40%)

This module offers the opportunity to perform in an off-campus venue following a successful audition. You’ll work with a professional director to prepare, rehearse, and perform in a public production. The module requires evening commitments during production week and focuses on developing professional working skills. If your audition is unsuccessful, you will need to select an alternative module.

Assessment: Performance (80%) and Reflective Portfolio (20%)

You’ll choose two options from the following modules:

Live Art
Explore experimental performance practices, including body art, living sculptures, and autobiographical performance. You’ll work with partners and collaborators, engaging with critical concepts and ethical debates surrounding these art forms.

Assessment: Performance (70%) and Viva (30%)

Staging Texts
This module focuses on decisions made when staging plays, exploring staging choices and their relationship to critical perspectives. You’ll analyse theatrical performances using evidence like digital materials, interviews, and prompt books.

Assessment: Presentation (40%) and Creative Portfolio (60%)

Theatre Company: Production
You’ll work as part of a theatre company to stage a public production, gaining experience in the full production process. The module involves technical production, design, and marketing tasks, alongside performance.

Assessment: Reflective Viva (30%) and Performance (70%)

Education and Performing Arts
This module explores performing arts education policy, pedagogy, and curriculum design, with a focus on contemporary performance pedagogy. You’ll examine the role of performing arts in the evolving English education system and apply creative methodologies to your project work.

Assessment: Practical 1 and 2, Creative Pitches (50% each)

This module encourages you to rethink the premise of ‘Creative Writing’ as self-expression. It will heighten your attention to the language that surrounds them in everyday life and involve an element of self-transformation in your attitudes towards relations between art and life.

Creative Writing is founded upon notions of ‘original’ composition, and the quest to find a ‘unique’ voice. The ability to generate new writing that expresses creative thought and reflects upon experiences is one of the enduring definitions of what it means to be human. But there is an alternative, playful, history of ‘Uncreative Writing’ that challenges these ideas and welcomes kinds of writing practice open to celebrating the ‘materiality’ of language, chance procedures, collage, ‘conceptual writing’, ‘found’ and ‘appropriated’ texts, and experiments with artificial constraints.

This alternate history is multi-disciplinary, and this module brings you into dialogue with a range of ideas, attitudes and practices that have been central to visual art, musical composition, mathematics, and Zen.

Key to the module is a celebration of the importance of play and experimentation as central tenets of creativity. You will be supported to develop a receptivity towards the creative resources of everyday life, and a willingness to transform everyday materials.

Assessment: Uncreative Portfolio (100%)

The final-year dissertation module provides you with an opportunity to work at length in a single form or genre of your choice. The aim is to produce professionally presented independent creative work. The precise composition of the dissertation will be negotiated with your tutor in accordance with departmental guidelines and must include written creative work accompanied by a critical reflective essay. You are expected to consider your own work in relation to current published work in the same and related genres.

You will be supported to learn from feedback, to edit, redraft and rethink your work. Working with a supervisor and response group, you will respond to feedback and provide feedback constructively over a longer period, mirroring more closely a real-world writing context. Working with others to manage your response groups and keeping your own records of supervision meetings will help you to develop skills which are of value in the workplace.

You will be managing a professional writing project from conception to completion; thus, the module also supports you to develop specific skills, capabilities and knowledge to adapt in different professional environments and contexts.

Assessment: Concept Testing (20%) and Dissertation (80%)