Bachelor of Arts - Creative Writing (Including Year Abroad) (W801)

Explore the urge to create and build new worlds, to share language and stories with others. On this course students 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 they offer an unusual approach to the practice of writing, combining innovative and traditional methods in order to develop students’ writing skills and abilities to judge their work critically, while expanding their knowledge across different modes and genres. In the Centre for Creative Writing they encourage a culture of experiment and creativity, enabling students 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 Kate 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.

Students will enhance their 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 their final year • Explore the psychological foundations of creativity in relation to myth • Surrealism and Defamiliarization • 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.

The course offers a varied, flexible and distinctive curriculum, focused on developing students’ abilities as a writer, while allowing them to take options from the other courses within the Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies including literature, filmmaking, journalism and drama.