MA Creative and Critical Writing

Program Overview

MA Creative and Critical Writing

Overview

The MA in Creative and Critical Writing invites you to focus on your passion for creative writing whilst engaging with the most up-to-date debates in critical theory. On the course, you will develop skills as a creative writer, reader and researcher, broadening your knowledge of the production and reception of literature under the supervision of award-winning authors and lecturers. You will experience an integrated approach to creative writing and contemporary developments in critical and cultural theories while exploring a range of established and evolving literary genres, such as historical fiction, memoir, and children’s literature.

Course Structure

The course is delivered as a flexible programme, accommodating full-time (1 year) and part-time (2-3 years) study routes, as well as CPD opportunities. Full-time students complete the two mandatory modules (Creative and Critical Writing Workshops and Dissertation Project) alongside three optional modules. Part-time students typically complete Creative and Critical Writing Workshops in year one and the Dissertation Project in year two/three and can negotiate the completion of their optional modules. Children’s Literature, Historical Fiction, Adaptation, and Writers in Residence can also be completed as standalone CPD modules.

Course Modules

Mandatory Modules

• Creative and Critical Writing Workshops: This module provides students with the main theoretical approaches and methodological frameworks that underpin the MA programme. In interactive seminars, students will be encouraged to reflect on the interconnected fields of creative writing and critical thinking and to develop their writing practice through the discussion of key concepts in critical theory.
• Dissertation Project: This module supports students in the preparation and submission of their Masters Project in Creative and Critical Writing. This assessment comprises of a 12,000-word writing project and a 3000-word reflective commentary. Students may use a multi-focussed approach to fiction
  on-fiction or creative/critical writing.

Optional Modules

• Writing Historical Fiction: Historical fiction is concerned with creative representations of the past, encompassing storytelling and history while engaging with questions of public and private memory, the role of the imagination, textual representations of experience, historiography and the nature of historical truth.
• Children’s Literature: Through the Looking Glass: Children’s literature is a vibrant and rapidly growing field of academic study, bringing together scholarly perspectives from a diverse range of subjects and discipline backgrounds.
• Adaptation: New Creative/Critical Directions: Adaptations of literature have appeared on screens since the birth of cinema, but the practice has expanded considerably in twenty-first-century culture, with many adaptations also engaging with a variety of critical and theoretical perspectives to appropriate literary and non-literary source texts.
• Writers in Residence: Writing residences are increasingly becoming part of the writer’s professional working practice and occur in diverse settings including libraries, book festivals, county archives, schools, hospitals, prisons, and wildlife trusts.

Entry Requirements

• UK Academic Requirements: An undergraduate degree with a minimum of 2:2 in a relevant subject. Other qualifications, relevant work and life experience may be taken into account.
• International Requirements: Please select your country of permanent residence from the list below, specific requirements for your country will then be shown.
• Transferring Credit: If you have previously studied at higher education level before you may be able to transfer credits to a related course at the University of Suffolk and reduce the period of study time necessary to achieve your degree.

Career Opportunities

The MA in Creative and Critical Writing is designed to support you in a number of professional contexts such as teaching, publishing, editing, and professional writing, as well as enhancing life skills and providing access to doctoral-level study.

Fees and Funding

• UK Full-time Tuition Fee: £9,150 per year
• UK Part-time Tuition Fee: £1,525 per 30 credit module
• International Full-time Tuition Fee: £15,210 per year

Facilities and Resources

The Ipswich campus offers an ideal location for studying creative and critical writing, with its state-of-the-art facilities including the Waterfront Building, a dedicated teaching, learning and social space at the heart of Neptune Quay, and The Hold, a unique and bespoke research centre for Suffolk’s nationally and internationally significant archives.