Bachelor of Arts (Honours) - English Literature and Creative Writing

Studying English Literature and Creative Writing with Hertfordshire will help students find their voice, whether as a poet, playwright, novelist or scholar of literature.

This joint course combines the study of literature with the practice of creative writing. Studying literature will give students a greater understanding of how literary texts work, while this improved critical insight will help them put principles into practice in their own creative writing.

Hertfordshire offers a stimulating and supportive place in which students can explore their ideas, hone their craft and understand literary texts. The creative writing modules are taught by lecturers who are themselves award-winning practitioners and who bridge the gap between creative and academic approaches to literature. They include poetry lecturer Wayne Holloway-Smith, winner of the Poetry Society’s Geoffrey Dearmer Prize and Seamus Heaney Prize nominee.

Over the three years students can choose specialist creative writing modules in poetry, creative non-fiction, drama, short story writing and prose fiction. Those specialisms are reflected in the English Literature modules, which range from children’s and young adult literature to film adaptations and work written in English from all over the world.

By the time students graduate, they will have a polished piece of work which has the potential for publication. Recent successes for our students include short stories published in Bandit and AnotherLenz magazines and poetry published in Rising and international magazine Poetry London.

In the first year, an underpinning core module, Becoming a Writer, will introduce students to genres and forms and examine the universalities of dialogue, plot and language. A second core module, Identity and Contemporary Writing, introduces them to some of the most exciting new writing as a model for their own work, while an optional module enables them to specialise in writing for the screen.

The practicalities of getting published or working in literary publishing are explored in a creative writing module in the second year taught by a former editor of Granta, the renowned magazine of new writing. For their final year students' particular creative interest can be channelled into a long piece of writing, which can be poetry, prose or drama.