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BA (Hons) Creative Writing and English Literature
Course options
Key Details
Course Overview
Do you dream of being a writer? Fantasise about seeing your name on the cover of a book, up in lights in the West End, or on the spooling credits of a film? Wonder how to gain access to the creative industries? At UEA you’ll find a home to nurture your creative talent and deepen it with the study of English Literature.
From day one you’ll explore the arts of fiction, poetry and scriptwriting. You’ll discover new writers and have thrilling discussions about the way texts are made. You’ll share examples of your own work to a constructive and supportive audience of your peers. Outside the classroom, guided work patterns will help you develop a writing practice that will maximise your potential.
As a Creative Writing and English Literature undergraduate, you’ll spend half your time on Creative Writing and half on English Literature. You’ll explore and experiment with diverse genres, forms and subjects, from creative collaboration, to podcasting, to the fiction of the apocalypse.
You’ll be based in the UK’s longest-established and most prestigious Creative Writing department , which is part of UEA’s vibrant School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing (you can follow our activities on Instagram! ). You’ll have access to world-leading facilities and resources, from the technological innovations of the Media Suite to the publishing opportunities of Egg Box , from the riches of the British Archive for Contemporary Writing to the world-famous Sainsbury Centre art museum. What’s more, you’ll live and work in the beautiful city of Norwich , a UNESCO City of Literature and home to the National Centre for Writing.
All the while, you’ll be acquiring vital professional skills and encountering people working in a host of creative and cultural industries . By the time you graduate, you’ll be a world-class communicator with a range of career paths opening to you, from publishing to journalism, from advertising to production – and, of course, being a published author!
Placement Year and Study Abroad
You have the option to apply to study abroad for one semester of your second year. Study abroad is a wonderfully enriching life experience – you'll develop confidence and adaptability and will have the chance to deepen your understanding of writing while learning about another culture. At UEA, you’ll be surrounded by the many students we welcome from around the world to study with us.
For further details, visit the study abroad section of our website.
Study and Modules
During your first year, you’ll take three bespoke Creative Writing modules in which you’ll develop your range of skills as a writer. The first semester is all about cultivating your craft. You’ll test out the possibilities of different forms and techniques, push your boundaries as a writer, and use writing exercises to help you generate material. In the second semester, you’ll experiment with avant-garde techniques and engage with genre while developing the ability to critically reflect on your own creative practice.
You’ll also explore writing as a collaborative practice, working with UEA students from other disciplines such as media, medicine or environmental science. You’ll broaden your scope as a writer, working on new forms for new audiences. At the same time, you’ll improve your skills as a close reader of literary texts and begin to grasp the span of English Literature in core literature-based modules. This is the start of the exciting interplay between reading and writing which you’ll draw upon throughout your degree.
Compulsory Modules
Creative writing: beginnings, creative writing: experiments with genre, new forms: writing in collaboration, reading literature in history, reading now, slow reading.
Whilst the University will make every effort to offer the modules listed, changes may sometimes be made arising from the annual monitoring, review and update of modules. Where this activity leads to significant (but not minor) changes to programmes and their constituent modules, the University will endeavour to consult with students and others. It is also possible that the University may not be able to offer a module for reasons outside of its control, such as the illness of a member of staff. In some cases optional modules can have limited places available and so you may be asked to make additional module choices in the event you do not gain a place on your first choice. Where this is the case, the University will inform students.
Teaching and Learning
Teaching
Nurtured by our world-leading creative writing tutors and working with fellow creative writing students, you'll start to get to grips with creative writing's fundamentals. This includes strategies for creating character, writing dialogue, determining mood, and maintaining atmosphere. You'll be mentored as you collaborate with students in other disciplines – your first taste of the contemporary working writer's world. Lectures on literature will surprise you with new ideas, and seminar discussions led by your tutor will shape your thinking about what you've read that week. If you’d like to get a sense of what sorts of books you might read in your first year, take a look at our list of suggested (but entirely optional) reading for incoming Creative Writing students .
At the start of your course, you'll also meet your academic adviser who'll support you throughout your degree with everything from choice of modules to launching your career.
Independent Learning
You’ll spend time on your own writing and your collaborative projects. You'll throw yourself into the whirlwind of extra-curricular creative writing events and activities. You'll read some extraordinary books, with a framework of guided tasks to help you get the most out of them, and discover a wealth of new resources in the library. By the end of this year, you'll be equipped with the fundamental skills necessary for your creative and literary journey.
Assessment
Throughout your degree, all modules in Creative Writing and in English Literature have no exams – we believe that the best way to express your thoughts about literature and to show off your creative development is through carefully crafted pieces of written coursework. On the creative side, you'll start by writing your own prose and poetry, developing fundamental skills in drafting, keeping a writer's notebook, and submitting to deadlines, before embarking on more experimental exercises. You'll produce work collaboratively and reflect on the process of working with your peers, developing a critical awareness of your creative practice. In your studies of literature, you'll develop renewed enthusiasm for writing academic essays. You’ll also get to express your thinking in a diverse variety of forms, from reviews to personal reflective writing.
Feedback
You'll receive feedback on your writing (creative and critical) from your tutors (e.g. in one-to-one tutorials) and your peers. Feedback on assessed work will be returned within 20 working days, after it has been carefully marked and moderated. As your first year does not count toward your overall degree result, it's a great time to experiment and take risks.
You’ll begin to focus your creative writing on particular forms, choosing from prose, poetry, and scriptwriting modules. You’ll share your writing with your peers and with a published author in our creative writing workshops, receiving feedback and learning how to give constructive criticism to your peers, too. You might also take a module in creative non-fiction, which will develop your skills in life writing and hybrid forms, working both in the classroom and through a short placement that will give you direct experience of writing in the world.
As a literary critic, you'll be able to choose from all the available literature modules, gaining a grounding in a variety of literary periods and traditions. You might also choose to experiment with our innovative creative-critical modules, where the reading and writing of literature go hand-in-hand. Over the course of this year, you’ll take a module on Shakespeare or an historical period of English literature from before 1789.
Optional A Modules
Shakespeare (pre-1789), romantic transformations: 1740-1830, early modern writing 1600-1740: the making of english literature (pre-1789), critical theory and practice, medieval writing: quest, fable and romance (pre-1789), contemporary fiction, literature studies semester abroad (spring), victorian writing, european literature, optional b modules, the short story (aut), making it public: publishing, audience, & creative enterprise, the writing of journalism (aut), the writing of history, transatlantic cultures, reading and writing contemporary poetry, reading and writing in elizabethan england (pre-1789), arts and humanities placement module, lgbt and beyond: sexual cultures, queer identities, and the politics of desire, literature and philosophy, optional c modules, creative writing: poetry (aut), writing life: the writer's world through creative non-fiction, scriptwriting: stage/audio, creative writing: prose fiction (spr), scriptwriting: tv/film, scriptwriting: screen and stage, creative writing: prose fiction (aut).
Teaching
Your creative work will now be taken to the next level through the 'workshopping' process (pioneered in the UK by UEA), where you'll get feedback on your writing from your peers under the direction of one of our creative writing tutors, and learn the art of offering constructive critique to your fellow writers. You might bring your writing into the wider world through a placement with an organisation or community group, supported by our creative writing team. Lectures and seminars will immerse you in particular eras and genres of literature, and you may also take seminars in more vocational subjects, such as journalism or publishing (using our state-of-the-art Media Suite).
You'll deepen your confidence in the craft of creative writing, gain real-world experience of the demands and exhilarating rewards of collaborating with others, continue to enrich your writing through the study of literature, and finish the year with a real sense of how your degree might open out into future careers.
You'll continue to submit 100% coursework for all your creative writing and literature modules. Your creative writing will flourish as you produce more substantial pieces of prose (a 1250-word short story or longer 2000-word narrative), portfolios of poetry, or scripts for stage or screen (20-30 minutes in length) and write reflective pieces to understand better your own creative processes. Your writing will be energised by encounters with real-life subjects as you experience the writer’s world first-hand, and you'll write reflectively about the ethics and complexities of drawing on real life subjects. You'll continue to hone your critical essay writing, and you might experiment with 'creative criticism', for instance by writing a short story which reveals your critical understanding of that form.
Feedback
You'll continue to have the support and feedback of all your tutors. Your creative work will be deepened by your immersion in the workshop environment, where you receive feedback from your peers and learn to give feedback on their work, an enormously valuable skill in many careers.
In your final-year creative writing modules, you'll focus intensively on your own practice. You’ll take a workshop, modelled on our world-famous Creative Writing MA. This will give you the chance to further develop your work in a particular form: prose, poetry, or scriptwriting. You’ll also have the chance to write a creative dissertation, in which you produce a substantial piece of poetry, prose or script with one-to-one support from a tutor. Or you can choose a module in which you'll be able to publish your own book and develop skills in performing your own work for an audience. On the literature side, you’ll choose from a dazzling array of specialist modules organised into two option ranges. Topics currently cover everything from medieval monsters to contemporary children’s literature.
CREATIVE WRITING: PROSE (AUT)
Creative writing dissertation (aut), writing television drama, creative writing: scriptwriting, creative writing dissertation (spr), creative writing: prose, publication, production, performance, the business of books (pre-1789), literature dissertation: (pre-1789) (aut), literature dissertation: (pre-1789) (spr), literature dissertation: post-1789 (spr), nervous narratives, the birth of the gothic: romance, revolution, empire, monsters, marvels and creative medieval heritage (pre-1789), women's writing in early-modern britain: the emergence of female authorship (pre-1789), shakespeare's dramatic worlds (pre-1789), literature dissertation: post-1789 (aut), reading modern japanese literature: translation and canonisation, banned books, ghosts, haunting and spectrality, culture and performance, mythos: rewriting the classics (pre-1789), children's literature, the art of emotion: literature, writing and feeling, imaginary endings: british fiction and the apocalypse, the art of murder, feminist writing.
Your immersion in the writer's world culminates as you're mentored through the intensive editorial and revision process needed to ensure your work meets industry standards for publication or performance. You might take a three-hour workshop led by a member of our creative writing team or choose to work one-on-one with a creative writing tutor to produce a substantial creative dissertation. Either way, you’ll be writing with confidence and a real sense of your professional and creative identity. Alongside this, you'll have the chance to explore cutting-edge literary topics in real depth, in three-hour seminars taught by specialists passionate about their subject.
You'll work with increasing confidence and independence as a literary critic. You'll also have the option to bring together all your experience as a creative writer to complete the year (and the degree) with a tangible product of everything you've been learning – your own book and recorded performance piece.
Assessment
You'll continue to be assessed by 100% coursework. You'll have the option to take a module in which you turn your work into a book and performance piece that meets industry standards, and which is a full reflection of the writer you have become. You can also choose to participate in another workshop or to embark on a creative dissertation (6000 words writing + 2000 words reflection), the culmination of your achievements as a writer. Alongside your creative work, you'll have the chance to produce in-depth explorations of literature (3500-5000 words). If you wish, you might continue to experiment with the forms in which you express your ideas about literary texts, for instance by experimenting with the new boundary-defying genre of ‘auto-fiction’.
You'll continue to receive in-depth written and oral feedback, from both tutors and peers, in both workshops and one-on-one supervisions. All the feedback you've received will enable you to graduate with highly developed transferable skills in writing across a host of forms and for an array of audiences, together with an ability to give sensitive but incisive critique of others' work.
Entry Requirements
UK and International fee-paying students. Choose UK or International above to see relevant information. The entry point is in September each year.
We welcome and value a wide range of qualifications, and we recognise that some students might take a mixture of different qualifications. We have listed typical examples that we accept for entry.
You should hold or be working towards the specified English and Mathematics requirements and one of the examples of typical entry qualifications listed below. If your qualifications aren’t listed, or if you are taking a combination of qualifications that isn’t specified, please contact Admissions.
All applicants must hold or be working towards GCSEs in English Language and Mathematics at minimum grade C or grade 4.
In place of Mathematics GCSE we can also consider Functional Skills Level 2 Mathematics.
We accept a wide range of English Language qualifications, please see our English Language equivalencies page.
UEA are committed to ensuring that Higher Education is accessible to all, regardless of their background or experiences. One of the ways we do this is through our contextual admissions schemes .
AAA including English Literature or one of the subjects listed below.
Contextual offer: ABB including English Literature or one of the subjects listed below:
English Language and Literature, English Language, History, Ancient History, History of Art, Archaeology, Anthropology, Classical Civilisation, Classical Studies, Politics, Government and Politics, Sociology, Drama, Theatre Studies, Film Studies, Philosophy, Religious Studies, Media Studies, Psychology or Law.
Level 3 Extended Diploma: DDD plus A-Level grade A in English Literature or one of the subjects listed below.
Contextual offer: DDM plus A-Level grade A in English Literature or one of the subjects listed below:
English Language and Literature, English Language, History, Ancient History, History of Art, Archaeology, Anthropology, Classical Civilisation, Classical Studies, Politics, Government and Politics, Sociology, Drama, Theatre Studies, Film Studies, Philosophy, Religious Studies, Media Studies, Psychology or Law.
Combinations of BTEC and A levels
Diploma: DD plus A at A-Level in English Literature or one of the above subjects.
Extended Certificate: D plus AA at A-Level including English Literature or one of the above subjects.
BTEC in Public Services, Uniformed Services and Business Administration are all excluded from our BTEC offers.
Access to HE Diploma
Access to Humanities and Social Sciences Pathway. Pass Access to HE Diploma with Distinction in 45 credits at Level 3.
T levels
Not accepted
Foundation Year options:
If you do not meet the academic requirements for direct entry, you may be interested in one of our Foundation Year programmes such as: BA English Literature with Creative Writing with a Foundation Year
International Baccalaureate
34 points overall including 6 in HL English, History, Global Politics or Psychology.
Irish Leaving Certificate
6 subjects at H2 including English Literature or one of the following subjects: English Language and Literature, English Language, History, Ancient History, History of Art, Archaeology, Anthropology, Classical Civilisation, Classical Studies, Politics, Government and Politics, Sociology, Drama, Theatre Studies, Film Studies, Philosophy, Religious Studies, Media Studies, Psychology or Law.
Scottish Highers
AAAA plus Scottish Advanced Higher at grade B in English Literature, or one of the following subjects: English Language and Literature, English Language, History, Ancient History, History of Art, Archaeology, Anthropology, Classical Civilisation, Classical Studies, Politics, Government and Politics, Sociology, Drama, Theatre Studies, Film Studies, Philosophy, Religious Studies, Media Studies, Psychology or Law.
Scottish Advanced Highers
BBB, including English Literature or one of the following subjects: English Language and Literature, English Language, History, Ancient History, History of Art, Archaeology, Anthropology, Classical Civilisation, Classical Studies, Politics, Government and Politics, Sociology, Drama, Theatre Studies, Film Studies, Philosophy, Religious Studies, Media Studies, Psychology or Law.
A combination of Advanced Highers and Highers may be acceptable.
Candidates who are shortlisted will be asked to provide a sample of their creative writing: we ask for around 5-7 pages of work, which can be on any subject and in any genre of the candidate's choice. Most choose to send poetry, prose, or a mixture of the two.
We welcome applications from students who have already taken or intend to take a gap year. We believe that a year between school and university can be of substantial benefit. You are advised to indicate your reason for wishing to defer entry on your UCAS application.
Our Admissions Policy applies to the admissions of all undergraduate applicants.
International Baccalaureate
We accept many international qualifications for entry to this course. for specific details about your country, view our information for international students ..
If you do not meet the academic and/or English language requirements for direct entry our partner, INTO UEA offers progression on to this undergraduate degree upon successful completion of a preparation programme. Depending on your interests, and your qualifications you can take a variety of routes to this degree.
Applications from students whose first language is not English are welcome. We require evidence of proficiency in English (including writing, speaking, listening and reading):
IELTS: 6.5 overall (minimum 5.5 in all components)
We also accept a number of other English language tests. Review our English Language Equivalencies for a list of example qualifications that we may accept to meet this requirement.
Test dates should be within two years of the course start date.
If you do not yet meet the English language requirements for this course, INTO UEA offer a variety of English language programmes which are designed to help you develop the English skills necessary for successful undergraduate study.
Fees and Funding
Tuition Fees
View our information for Tuition Fees .
Scholarships and Bursaries
We are committed to ensuring that costs do not act as a barrier to those aspiring to come to a world leading university and have developed a funding package to reward those with excellent qualifications and assist those from lower income backgrounds. View our range of Scholarships for eligibility, details of how to apply and closing dates.
Course Related Costs
Please see Additional Course Fees for details of course-related costs.
How to Apply
UCAS Hub is a secure online application system that allows you to apply for full-time undergraduate courses at universities and colleges in the United Kingdom.
Your application does not have to be completed all at once. Register or sign in to UCAS to get started.
Once you submit your completed application, UCAS will process it and send it to your chosen universities and colleges.
The Institution code for the University of East Anglia is E14.
View our guide to applying through UCAS for useful tips, key dates and further information:
How to apply through UCAS
Employability
After the course.
You'll be a first-rate writer and an advanced critical and creative thinker with an independent cast of mind. You’ll know how to manage your time, how to work collaboratively, and how to operate as a writer in the world of work. With the support of our award-winning Careers Service throughout your degree, you’ll have honed your CV and sought out internships. You’ll have attended Working with Words, an annual event in which you get to meet UEA alumni working in the creative industries. You might have got involved with the UEA Publishing Project, or its student arm, Egg Box , or undertaken independent research in UEA’s British Archive of Contemporary Writing . In an increasingly text-based world, these skills and experiences are highly valued by employers.
You could go on to work as a prose fiction or non-fiction writer, a poet or a scriptwriter, or go into many careers in arts, media, publishing, politics, charities and NGOs, teaching, or the commercial sector. You’ll also be well placed to study for a postgraduate degree, including one of our world-famous Creative Writing MAs . Regardless of the direction you choose, you'll be superbly placed to start writing your own story.
Examples of careers you could enter include:
- Freelance writer
- Scriptwriter
- Publishing
- Community and Arts-related Projects
- Marketing
- Communication and PR
Discover more on our Careers webpages .
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