Program Overview

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With the expertise of our scholars and creative practitioners, you’ll gain a distinctively unique degree which blends together the highly complementary disciplines of literature and creative writing. You will study a broad range of writing, from lyric poetry to contemporary fiction, whilst the flexible nature of our MA Literature and Creative Writing degree allows you to choose a creative-practice pathway or a theoretical pathway. Studying literature and creative writing at Essex means that you can build your degree around your interests. Explore literature across time, geography and genre, while challenging yourself with our practice-based creative writing modules. Such modules, like our Creative Writing workshop, helps to hone your literary craft and technique, emphasising innovation and experimentation. You study an eclectic range of topics such as:

• European Avant-Gardes of the Early Twentieth Century
• Global Writing and Literature in English
• Lyric Poetry
• Psychogeography
• Writing Audio and Digital Drama

Based in our Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies , you’ll join a community of novelists, dramatists, story-tellers and poets. We’ve 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. Why we're great.

• Join a diverse network of distinguished alumni including Booker Prize and Pulitzer Prize winners
• Publish your own work in our annual creative writing journal, Creel
• Discover innovative practical ways of engaging with texts including theatre visits and archival research

Our expert staff

Our Department is a vibrant conservatoire of scholars and practitioners who are committed to unlocking creative personal responses to literature and creative writing. This distinctive environment is possible because we are a community of award-winning novelists, poets and playwrights, as well as leading literature specialists. Our academic staff specialise in a range of areas including modernism, comparative and world literature, Shakespeare, the Renaissance, modernism, travel writing, nature writing, translated literature, cultural geography, Irish and Scottish writing, U.S. and Caribbean literatures, and the history of reading.

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Specialist facilities

• Meet fellow readers at our department’s Myth Reading Group
• Write for our student magazine on our media platform REBEL or host a REBEL Radio show
• Publish your own work in our annual creative writing journal, Creel
• View classic films at weekly film screenings in our dedicated 120-seat cinema, Cine10
• Learn from leading writers and literature specialists at weekly research seminars
• Our on-campus Lakeside Theatre has been established as a major venue for good drama, staging both productions by professional touring companies and a wealth of new work written, produced and directed by our own staff and students
• Improve your playwriting and performance skills at our Lakeside Theatre Workshops
• Our Research Laboratory allows you to collaborate with professionals, improvising and experimenting with new work which is being tried and tested

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Your future

A good literature and creative writing degree opens many doors and our students have gone on to work in a number of careers such as writers, editors, publishers, scholars, university lecturers, teachers, journalists, arts administrators, theatre artistic directors, drama advisers, and translators. We also offer supervision for PhD, MPhil and MA by Dissertation in different literatures and various approaches to literature, covering most aspects of early modern and modern writing in English, plus a number of other languages. Our University is one of only 11 AHRC-accredited Doctoral Training Centres in the UK. This means that we offer funded PhD studentships which also provide a range of research and training opportunities. We also work with our Student Development Team to help you find out about further work experience, internships, placements, and voluntary opportunities.