Course summary

Develop your creativity and sharpen your critical abilities with this course that will equip you with valuable skills as both a reader and a writer. You’ll produce creative work across various genres, such as fiction, poetry, life writing, and travel accounts.  You'll also learn how writers of the past and the present have used words and literary forms to express their ideas and engage with their times’ social and cultural issues.  You’ll encounter historical and modern texts in English from around the globe, which explore themes relevant to how we live today, including race and ethnicity, gender, climate change and nature, social class, disability and wellbeing.  Learn how to shape language to convey your ideas and experience, work in groups, discuss your writing with other students, and build an individual portfolio of work that will set you on track for a creative or cultural industries career. The School of English supports a vibrant community of researchers and creative practitioners. It is home to the Leeds Poetry Centre, and we regularly host readings and talks by well-known and emerging contemporary writers.  The School also produces a literary magazine, Stand, and publishes the best in new creative writing. The School has hosted many inspiring writers over the years, as staff or students. These include the novelists Storm Jameson and JRR Tolkien, poets Geoffrey Hill and Jon Silkin, and the distinguished African writers Wole Soyinka and Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Our Professor of Poetry, Simon Armitage, is also the Poet Laureate.