Course summary

The MFA Creative Writing at Leeds enables you to refine and develop your distinctive creativity toward a focused project that leads to a full-length manuscript worthy of submission to publishers. Our award-winning and internationally recognised writers and poets are uniquely positioned to support you through monthly one-to-one supervisions in writing prose fiction (including the novel, the short story collection and genre writing), poetry (including visual poetry and poetry in performance), creative nonfiction (including memoir and autofiction) or playwrighting. We have strong industry links as an institution and as individual writers and poets. Our tutors’ books are published by presses including Bloomsbury, Cape, Carcanet, Faber, Linen Press, Melville House, Sceptre, Verve, and zimZalla. Their work appears in innovative international literary magazines and festivals and is represented by leading agents. Leeds and Yorkshire are a hub for literary creativity, and this course will enable you to encounter this storied past and dynamic present during a residential week on campus. Your degree cohort will comprise practicing writers keen to take their writing further, just like you. A residential week at the start of the year will bring staff and students together for workshops and masterclasses on craft, process, and context, as well as public readings and Q&As. Throughout the year, there will be periodic workshops/masterclasses held online. In the residential week and the online sessions, you will hear from our team of tutors as well as other writers, poets and literary professionals affiliated with Leeds. Your supportive and rigorous online one-to-one supervisions will occur on a monthly basis. The degree will culminate with the final project marked by written assessment and viva voce. The University partners with Ilkley and Leeds Literature Festivals and works extensively with publishers including Peepal Tree Press and Carcanet, and creative industry partners such as Opera North and the Henry Moore Institute. Our Professor of Poetry Simon Armitage is establishing the National Poetry Centre at the heart of our campus, complementing our own extensive literary manuscript holdings in the world-renowned Brotherton Library and our University of Leeds Poetry Centre. Among our current staff is the Poet Laureate Simon Armitage. Other staff in the creative writing team include Kimberly Campanello, Matt Howard, SK Perry, Ross Raisin, Jess Richards, Caitlin Stobie and Jay Prosser. Our practices and passions run across creative and critical writing. They include: visual and experimental poetry; the long poem; eco poetics; the contemporary novel and contemporary lyric poem; literature and medicine; disability studies; autofiction; and transgender memoir.