MA in Creative Writing 2020-2021
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MA in Creative Writing 2020-2021 This course booklet should be read in conjunction with the School of Humanities Postgraduate Taught Handbook, available here MA Creative Writing: Introduction The degree aims to provide a flexible and progressive structure in which you are enabled to practise the art of literary composition, to acquire advanced familiarity and fluency in using literary techniques, and to acquire an understanding of and appropriate skills relating to practice-based research. You will also develop the ability to reflect critically on your own practice. The course also allows you to develop your work as a writer to a professional level, going beyond the personal to write with an engaged sense of literary culture, its social role and contemporary practices.The MA is designed for students with an established writing practice who are intending to develop their creative writing beyond first-degree level. It is also designed for those students wishing to proceed to MPhil or PhD. You will take one of three distinct pathways: Fiction, Literary Non-Fiction or Poetry. While the pathways share a similar structure, they are taught separately so as to ensure students can work to a consistently high level. You cannot switch or combine pathways. In addition to the workshop, you will take modules in Supplementary Discourses and Reading as a Writer, which will also be specific to your pathway. You will submit critical and creative coursework, and will undertake a final practical project and long essay. Fiction You will learn how to structure and edit your prose to a publishable standard while also developing an expert sense of how best to draw on the personal, the actual and the imagination. We have no house style, and encourage both experiment and rigour. In developing your analytical and editorial skills, you will sharpen your self-criticism. Literary Non-Fiction You will explore the range of possibilities that experimental and literary non-fiction have to offer from memoir to polemic, from the essay to the hybrid form. You will learn how to activate and deploy your material while developing your approach to research. You will learn how to draw on all these to develop original work of your own to a publishable standard. Poetry This pathway is for writers of all kinds of poetry, who are focused on publication on the page or in page form. You will learn how to locate and refine your personal poetics, and how to develop a poem to its fullest potential. You will be taught how to revise and edit, how to sustain a writing practice, and how to locate your poetry within a broader literary context. 3 Location The Creative Writing MA is taught at Royal Holloway’s central London campus in the heart of London’s Bloomsbury, at 11 Bedford Square or at Senate House. Key Contacts Administrative queries such as coursework submission, registration, extensions and deferrals, etc. The School of Humanities administrative team – [email protected] Workshop and seminar content or planning queries, personal concerns – in the first instance, contact your module tutor. If this is not satisfactory or appropriate, contact the pathway convenor or your personal tutor. If this does not resolve the problem, contact the programme director. Head of Department: Professor Ruth Livesey [email protected] Department Postgraduate Taught Courses Lead: Dr Alastair Bennett [email protected] Director of the MA Creative Writing: Professor Lavinia Greenlaw [email protected] Student Services: [email protected] IT Helpdesk: [email protected] Wellbeing/pastoral support: [email protected] International student support: [email protected]. PATHWAY CONVENORS Fiction – Mr Matt Thorne [email protected] Literary Non-Fiction – Dr Eley Williams [email protected] Poetry – Dr Sean Borodale [email protected] 4 2020-21 MA Teaching Staff Fiction Ms Nadifa Mohamed [email protected] Mr Matt Thorne [email protected] Dr Eley Williams [email protected] Dr Anna Whitwham [email protected] Literary Non-Fiction Dr Sean Borodale: [email protected] Professor Lavinia Greenlaw: [email protected] Dr Eley Williams: [email protected] Poetry Dr Sean Borodale: [email protected] Professor Lavinia Greenlaw: [email protected] Dr Eley Williams: [email protected] Biographies Dr Sean Borodale works as a poet and artist, making scriptive and documentary poems written on location. He was selected as a Granta New Poet in 2012. His debut collection Bee Journal (published by Jonathan Cape) was shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize and the Costa Book Award in 2013. In 2014 he was selected as a PBS Next Generation Poet. Mighty Beast, a documentary poem for Radio 3, won the Radio Academy Gold Award in 2014 for Best Feature or Documentary. His topographical poem 'Notes for an Atlas' (Isinglass 2003) was recommended by Robert Macfarlane in the Guardian Summer Books 2005, and was adapted as a live theatre performance in 2007 at the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall, directed by Mark Rylance, as part of the first London Festival of Literature. His second collection, Human Work, was published in 2015, and his third collection Asylum, written under the ground, was published in 2018 and recently long-listed for the Laurel Prize. His fourth collection, Inmates, is to be published in 2020. From 2016-18 he was Artist/Writer-in- residence at Bluecoat in Liverpool, where he established ‘the lyrigraph sessions’, a voice lab to develop ways of performing his screen printed, situated texts called lyrigraphs. Other fellowships and residencies include Creative Fellow at Trinity College Cambridge, Northern Arts Fellow at the Wordsworth Trust, Oscar Wilde Fellow at Trinity College Dublin, Fellow of the Moore Institute, NUIGalway, and Guest Artist at the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam. From 2002-2007 he was a teaching fellow at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL. Professor Lavinia Greenlaw is a writer in a broad range of forms with research interests in the visual arts, scientific process and imperative, music, image making and interrupted perception. Her poetry, published by Faber, includes The Built Moment (2019), The Casual Perfect (2011) and A Double Sorrow: Troilus and Criseyde (2014). Her first novel, Mary George 5 of Allnorthover (Flamingo 2001), received France’s Prix du Premier Roman Etranger. Her third, In the City of Love’s Sleep, was published by Faber in 2018. Her works of experimental non-fiction are The Importance of Music to Girls (Faber 2007) and Questions of Travel: William Morris in Iceland (Notting Hill Editions 2011). Her short stories include We Are Watching Something Terrible Happening and The Darkest Place in England, both shortlisted for the National Short Story Award. Her immersive sound work, Audio Obscura, was commissioned in 2011 from Artangel and won the Ted Hughes Award. She was the first artist-in-residence at the Science Museum and, in 2013, one of the first two artists to receive a Wellcome Engagement Fellowship. In 2016, she wrote and directed a short film, The Sea is an Edge and an Ending, an exploration of dementia and the present tense. She taught at Goldsmiths College before becoming Professor of Poetry at UEA, and has held guest professorships at the Freieuniversitat Berlin and King’s College London. She has also written and directed drama for radio, and has written libretti for three operas. She was chair of judges for the inaugural Folio Prize and is chair of the 2020 TS Eliot Prize. She is a fellow and former trustee of the Royal Society of Literature and is also a former chair of the Poetry Society. She is writing a book about seeing and not seeing further. Ms Nadifa Mohamed was born in Hargeisa in 1981 while Somalia was falling deeper into dictatorship. In 1986 she moved to London with her family in what she thought was a temporary move but a couple of years later it became permanent as war broke out in Somalia. She was educated in London and went to Oxford to study History and Politics. She finally returned to Hargeisa, now in the new Republic of Somaliland, in 2008. Her first novel, Black Mamba Boy, was longlisted for the Orange Prize; shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the PEN Open Book Award; and won the Betty Trask Prize. Her second novel, The Orchard of Lost Souls, was published in 2013 and Mohamed was selected as one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists in the same year. The Orchard of Lost Souls won the Somerset Maugham Prize, the Prix de l'Academie des Sciences d'Outre-mer, and was shortlisted for a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. Nadifa lives in London and her next novel, The Fortune Men, is forthcoming in the UK from Viking. Professor Redell Olsen (on leave till May 2o21) makes work in poetry, film and performance. She is currently the engaged on a project in collaboration with Opera North, The Tetley, Leeds and the National Science and Media Museum which responds to representations of the biodiversity of insects. Now Circa (1918): a film in response to the anniversary of 100 years of female suffrage in the UK was shortlisted for 'Best Research Film of the Year' in the AHRC Research in Film Awards in 2018. Her performance work, ‘Observation Judgement Action’ or (Foil, Jumping, Daisies)’ on the work of Josef and Anni Albers was shown in Cambridge, London and South Wales in 2018. Film Poems (Les Figues, 2014) collects the texts for her films and performances from 2007–2012.