School of Creative Arts, Film and Media (SCAFM)

The MA in Creative Writing at the University of Portsmouth focuses on your creative writing, on developing your sense of methods and approaches to the creative writing, and on actively developing your own creative and critical understanding of the writing arts.

The course encourages you to develop creative writing that has relevance to your current and future ambitions and to discover the context of your own work. It also provides a concentrated opportunity to become aware of the practice of other writers in the genre or genres in which you wish to work (eg. prose fiction, script, poetry, creative non-fiction).

The School of Creative Arts, Film and Media was recently awarded a joint Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB) grant to provide research training in creative writing, the first award of this kind in Britain. Writers connected with the course include national and international award-winners, and the School regularly talks to writers around the world via video link. The annual Great Writing international creative writing conference has been held in the School for the past 2 years, and has attracted creative writers and university creative writing teachers from around the world. The current Head of School is the Chair of the UK Centre for Creative Writing Research Through Practice and the founder and currently co-editor of the journal New Writing: the International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing.

Applicants should usually have a first degree in a relevant subject at the level of 2.1 or better. Alternatively, it might be that an applicant will simply have a degree and/or notable experience as a creative writer. Each application is considered on its merits.

Length of Submission

In creative writing it is always very difficult to define a submission according to length, as different genre involve different lengths of work. There are national and international ideas about this, and it is generally agreed that 'length' needs to be thought of in terms of 'equivalences'. Thus, whatever genre you are working in (eg: prose fiction, script, poetry) you will be expected to produce creative work equivalent to 15,000 -- 20,000 words of prose, and to produce critical responses, developed from your work, in addition to that. A typical MA in Creative Writing would produce work, in total, of between 25,000 and 40,000 words.