east anglia creative writing ma

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MA Creative Writing Prose Fiction

Key Details

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Course Overview

Our course will help transform you as a writer, giving you a surer sense of the imaginative, artistic and intellectual challenges involved in any act of writing.

You’ll study the craft of prose fiction with an international cohort of other excellent writers, and you’ll be taught by an outstanding and committed faculty – which includes Jean McNeil, Naomi Wood and Tessa McWatt, to name a few – alongside internationally recognised visiting writers – recent examples include Tsitsi Dangarembga, Margaret Atwood, Ali Smith, Caryl Phillips and Preti Taneja.

We’ll challenge you to explore your notions about writing and being a writer, provoking you into play, experimentation and risk, with the intention of making you the best writer you can be.

After this intensive year, you’ll leave the course confident of technique and craft, as well as your own voice. It’s no wonder that our students’ success is unparalleled, with many of our graduates going on to publish their own work, and others moving into publishing, journalism or teaching.

The MA in Prose Fiction at UEA is the oldest and most prestigious Creative Writing programme in the UK. Solely focused on the writing of fiction, we take a rigorous and creative approach to enable you to develop your ideas, voice, technique and craft.

You’ll experience an intensive immersion in the study of writing prose fiction. You’ll take core creative modules but can also choose from a wide range of critical modules, and benefit from our proven strengths in modernism and creative-critical studies, among others.

Graduates of our MA Creative Writing Prose Fiction have enjoyed extraordinary success in terms of publications and prizes. Our alumni include Nobel Laureate Sir Kazuo Ishiguro, fellow Booker Prize winners Ian McEwan and Anne Enright, Costa First Book Award Winners Emma Healey and Christie Watson, and many other internationally renowned novelists including Ayobami Adebayo, Naomi Alderman, Tash Aw, Stephen Buoro, Tracy Chevalier, Joe Dunthorne, Diana Evans, Mohammed Hanif, Elizabeth Macneal and Catriona Ward. The continuing success of our graduates means we are fortunate in being able to attract the best writers from around the world – writers like you.

While you are at UEA, the focus will be on exploring your creative potential, in a highly supportive and well-resourced environment.

In 2011, UEA’s Creative Writing programme was awarded the Queen’s Anniversary Prize for Higher and Further Education in recognition of our continuing excellence in delivering innovative courses at a world-class level.

Study and Modules

This MA is a one-year full-time course (you can also take it part-time over two years). The full-time course consists of two semesters of 12 weeks, followed by a dissertation period of six weeks. The autumn semester lasts from September to December, and the spring semester from January to April. The dissertation supervision period ends in June, and you’ll submit your final piece of work in September.

In each semester, you’ll study two modules. One of these – in both semesters – is the compulsory Prose Fiction workshop. This is a weekly three-hour session, during which your group will discuss your fellow students’ works-in-progress. You’ll get the chance to attend a follow-up tutorial with your class tutor each time your work is discussed in these workshops.

Each workshop is assigned a tutor for the autumn semester, and a different tutor for the spring semester. Groups are ‘shuffled’ in December so you can encounter the widest range of peer responses to your work during the course. Teaching styles vary, but typically three students each week will have their work discussed by the group. The work-in-progress (around 5,000 words) is circulated a week in advance, and annotated copies are returned to the student at the end of the session. The emphasis is always on constructive criticism, and the expectation is that the group will gain as much from the discussion as will the individual whose work is being discussed. You can expect your writing to be workshopped multiple times over the course of the two semesters.

In each semester, you’ll choose a second module from the broad range of modules, both creative and critical, available in the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing .

In the summer dissertation period, you’ll be assigned a supervisor for individual tutorials in which you’ll discuss your dissertation. You’ll then write this independently over the summer.

Compulsory Modules

Creative writing workshop: prose 1, creative writing workshop: prose 2, creative writing research methodology conference, creative writing (prose) dissertation, optional a modules, the transformation of the book 1500-1700, the art of short fiction, fiction 'after' modernism: re-reading the 20th century, the art of the novel, japanese literature, living modernism, optional b modules, crime, mystery and the novel, ludic literature, east anglian literature, the non fiction novel, the poetics of place, creative encounters, the northern renaissance, 1500-1620, theory and practice of fiction, creative-critical writing, adaptation and interpretation.

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

You’ll be taught by an internationally renowned cohort of prize-winning authors, who have many years of experience in teaching Creative Writing. Current staff members who have taught on the MA include Trezza Azzopardi, Stephanie Bishop, Philip Langeskov, Giles Foden, Jean McNeil, Tessa McWatt, Julianne Pachico, and Naomi Wood. You’ll also be taught via one-to-one tutorials with your workshop leader to enrich your understanding of the key insights to come out of your workshop.

The one-to-one dissertation supervisions are intended to emulate the relationship that you may go on to have with an editor at a publishing house. Over the dissertation period, your tutor will be able to discuss your work and your ambitions for your project so that you will be best placed to draft and then finalise your work over the summer vacation.   Independent study

One of the great benefits of this year is that you’ll have ample time to read and write on your own. Some students use their independent study time to write a draft of a whole novel; others want to experiment over the course of the year with different projects and different styles.

You’ll submit 5,000 words of original fiction at the end of the autumn semester, and another 5,000 words at the end of the spring semester. You will also submit a 5,000-word piece of creative work or an essay (requirements vary) for each of your two optional modules.

For your dissertation, you’ll write 15,000 words of original fiction, to be submitted in September. All assessed work is marked and moderated by two members of the Creative Writing faculty, with the mark agreed between them.

Your work will be read and commented upon by faculty members around sixteen times over the course of the MA – this includes workshops, dissertation tutorials and the marking of assignments. Since this course and its tutors focus on prose fiction and the development of your abilities as a writer of prose fiction, we cannot workshop or assess other work you might produce, such as poetry or creative non-fiction. However, we would encourage you to circulate such work informally among your fellow students.

Entry Requirements

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: 7.0 overall (minimum 7.0 in writing and 6.0 in all other components)

Test dates should be within 2 years of the course start date.  

We also accept a number of other English language tests. Review  our English Language Equivalencies  for a list of qualifications that we may accept to meet this requirement.  

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:   

Pre-sessional English at INTO UEA    

Academic English at INTO UEA   

Promising candidates will be invited to one of our online interview days, which are scheduled across the academic year. Typically a candidate will be interviewed by two members of the Creative Writing faculty and we aim to inform candidates of the outcome within five working days. Unsuccessful candidates are welcome to re-apply, though not within the same academic year. Successful candidates will either be offered a place for the forthcoming academic year or a place for the following academic year (if it is felt that they need more time to develop as a writer). Once the forthcoming year is full candidates will be offered a place on our reserve list with the option of a place for the following academic year if a place does not become available. 

This course is open to UK and International applicants. The annual intake for this course is in September each year . 

Additional Information or Requirements

Candidates are required to submit a portfolio of writing for assessment of between 3000 and 5000 words with their application.  This could be part of a novel in progress or a piece or pieces of short fiction.

Our Admissions Policy applies to the admissions of all postgraduate applicants. 

Fees and Funding

Tuition fees for the Academic Year 2024/25 are: 

UK Students: £11,000 (full time) 

International Students: £22, 450 (full time)

If you choose to study part-time, the fee per annum will be half the annual fee for that year, or a pro-rata fee for the module credit you are taking (only available for Home students). 

We estimate living expenses at £1,023 per month. 

Further Information on tuition fees can be found  here . 

Scholarships and Bursaries 

The University of East Anglia offers a range of  Scholarships ; please click the link for eligibility, details of how to apply and closing dates.

The University of East Anglia offers a range of Scholarships . The following have the most relevance to the MA in Creative Writing:

Annabel Abbs Scholarship The Difference scholarship Global Voices Scholarships  Kowitz Scholarship  Maggie Humm Scholarship  Miles Morland Foundation African Writers' Scholarship Seth Donaldson Memorial Bursary  Sonny Mehta India Scholarship  Sonny Mehta Scholarship for Writers  UEA Booker Prize Foundation Scholarship  UEA Crowdfunded Writers' Scholarship 

To find out more, please go to the Scholarships Finder . Select the name of the scholarship, then select ‘view more’ to see if you meet the criteria, and ‘apply here’ to make an application.  

Course Related Costs

Please see Additional Course Fees for details of course-related costs.

How to Apply

Applications for Postgraduate Taught programmes at the University of East Anglia should be made directly to the University. 

The closing date for receipt of complete applications is 1 June 2024, including the relevant supporting documents and references. 

To apply please use our   online application form . 

FURTHER INFORMATION 

If you would like to discuss your individual circumstances prior to applying, please do contact us: 

Postgraduate Admissions Office 

Tel: +44 (0)1603 591515  Email:  [email protected]  

International candidates are also encouraged to access the  International Students  section of our website. 

Employability

After the course.

You’ll graduate as a better writer, reader and editor. You will graduate knowing how to best critique others’ work and your own. Many students go on to publish, others go on to a career in publishing, journalism, or teaching.

A degree at UEA will prepare you for a wide variety of careers. We've been ranked 1st for Job Prospects by StudentCrowd in 2022.

Example of careers that you could enter include:

    Writing

    Publishing

    Journalism

    Teaching

    Advertising

    Film and television

Discover more on our Careers webpages .

Creative Writing Prose Fiction starting September 2024 for 1 years

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MA Creative Writing Prose Fiction

University of east anglia uea, different course options.

• Key information

Course Summary

Tuition fees, entry requirements, university information, similar courses at this uni, key information data source : idp connect, qualification type.

MA - Master of Arts

Subject areas

Narrative Prose Writing

Course type

Our course will transform you as a writer, giving you a surer sense of the technical and emotional complexes that underpin any act of writing.

You’ll study the craft of prose fiction with an internationally excellent cohort of other writers, and you’ll be taught by an outstanding and committed faculty – which includes Andrew Cowan, Naomi Wood and Tessa McWatt, to name a few – alongside internationally recognised visiting writers – recent examples include Tsitsi Dangarembga, Margaret Atwood, Ali Smith, Caryl Phillips and Preti Taneja.

We will challenge you to explore your notions about writing and being a writer, provoking you into play, experimentation and risk, with the intention of making you the best writer you can be.

After this intensive year, you’ll leave the course confident of technique and craft, as well as your own voice. It’s no wonder that our students’ success is unparalleled, with many of our graduates going on to publish their own work – with others moving into publishing, journalism or teaching.

The MA Prose Fiction at UEA is the oldest and most prestigious Creative Writing programme in the UK. Solely focused on the writing of fiction, we take a rigorous and creative approach to enable you to develop your ideas, voice, technique and craft.

You’ll experience an intensive immersion in the study of writing prose fiction. You will take core creative modules but can also choose from a wide range of critical modules, and benefit from our proven strengths in modernism and creative-critical studies, among others.

Graduates of our MA Creative Writing Prose Fiction have enjoyed extraordinary success in terms of publications and prizes. Our alumni include Nobel Laureate Sir Kazuo Ishiguro, Baileys Women’s Prize-winner Naomi Alderman, Emma Healey and Tash Aw. The continuing success of our graduates means we are fortunate in being able to attract the best writers from around the world – writers like you.

While you are at UEA, the focus will very much be on exploring your creative potential, in a highly supportive and well-resourced environment.

In 2011, UEA’s Creative Writing programme was awarded the Queen’s Anniversary Prize for Higher and Further Education in recognition of our continuing excellence in delivering innovative courses at a world-class level.

UK fees Course fees for UK students

For this course (per year)

International fees Course fees for EU and international students

Bachelors (Hons) degree - 2.1 or equivalent preferred in any subject. Candidates are required to submit a portfolio of writing for assessment of between 3000 and 5000 words with their application. This could be part of a novel in progress or a piece or pieces of short fiction.

The University of East Anglia (UEA) is a world-renowned university known for its high standard across both taught and research postgraduate courses. Based in Norwich, in the county of Norfolk, the university has an excellent international reputation for the high standard of its research output. UEA is home to over 17,000 students, of which around 25% are postgraduate students. UEA is part of one of the biggest research communities in Europe... more

MA Creative Writing (Non-Fiction)

Full time | 1 year | 23-SEP-24

MA Creative Writing Crime Fiction (Part Time)

Part time | 2 years | 23-SEP-24

MA Creative Writing (Non-Fiction) (Part time)

Full time | 2 years | 23-SEP-24

Ignore the sneering – without creative-writing courses, British literature would sink

The UEA’s flagship course boasts a starry alumni list, yet amid cuts there are fears for its future, and that of our next great writers

“What is the difference between God and Malcolm Bradbury?” a student once wrote on a lavatory wall at the University of East Anglia. “None. Both are said to be everywhere yet are hard to see.” 

Whatever comment that student was passing on the author and critic’s apparently casual teaching practices, the point about Bradbury’s influence remains every bit as true, 23 years after his death. The creative-writing MA he established during the 1970s at UEA remains the gold standard of its type, the first of its kind in the UK and with an alumni list that reads like a roll call of late- 20th-century British and Irish literary talent: Rose Tremain, Ian McEwan , Kazuo Ishiguro, Anne Enright, Paul Murray, Diana Evans. If success can be measured in prizes, then the three Bookers, seven Costas, two Women’s Prizes and one Nobel won by UEA graduates are hard to beat. Certainly, it’s hard to think of another institution or person in the past 50 years that has had a greater influence on what we, as a nation, read and write. 

The news that the UEA’s current debts of £30 million threaten Bradbury’s legacy has therefore been met with understandable dismay. McEwan has called the subsequent decision that, of the proposed 36 redundancies in the academic staff, 31 will come from the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, as “gross bureaucratic folly”. The university says it “anticipates very few redundancies” from the creative-writing course, but that hasn’t reassured the 750 signatories, including current and former students, behind a letter of protest published in The Times. 

Arts and humanities degrees are under siege across the board, of course, as cash strapped institutions (and government funding decisions) prioritise Stem subjects and vocational courses. Even so, the diminishing of UEA’s writing MA – a course of global reputation, whose tutors have included Angela Carter and the critic Lorna Sage – feels like a major shift in the weather: a threat to the idea of the novel as an artform honed through expertise.

Before Bradbury set up the UEA creative-writing MA in 1971, there was no such thing as a creative-writing degree in the UK. The feeling, both in academia and the wider culture beyond, had been that writing was something one did by oneself, possibly in a garret, using God-given talent alone. The literary imagination was innate, and not something that could be cultivated or, perish the thought, bought. Bradbury, however, was always an outsider to mainstream thinking, and in the decidedly non-Oxbridge, non-metropolitan wilds of Norwich, he was keen to create, as the academic Lise Jaillant has pointed out, “a literary powerhouse... as a reaction against existing models of literary success”.

Rejecting what he regarded as the “British custom of amateurish isolationism”, Bradbury modelled his creative-writing course on the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop, established in 1936, in which a dozen or so students would gather on a regular basis to critique each other’s work. From the beginning, the emphasis at UEA was on reading, on rewriting one’s own work, and on using the literature of the past as a guide to best practice. He was well aware that the concept would be met with profound scepticism. The course, he later said, “was generally regarded as a dangerous American invention, like the vacuum cleaner and the hula hoop, and certainly not one that had a place in the literature department of a British university.”

These days, 96 British universities offer more than 400 creative-writing courses between them, and that’s before one counts up the proliferating online courses variously run by established authors, teachers, private institutions, publishers (including the in-house Faber Academy, set up in 2008) – not to mention complete unknowns. Many of the best use the workshop method, in which a piece of work is deconstructed and discussed in front of its author, but some follow a conservatoire approach of one-to-one tuition. Their shared aim is to teach their students good writing, but also, invariably, how to get published, which is not always the same thing.

Still, those who incorporate vision with rigour have the potential to become literary movements in their own right. The Dublin-based Stinging Fly, which as a magazine launched the careers of Sally Rooney, Nicole Flattery and Kevin Barry, now offers writer workshops and is one of the most powerful literary forces in Ireland today. 

In America, MFA creative-writing degrees are so ingrained in the culture that they have literally shaped the country’s postwar literary imagination: prominent graduates include Jay McInerney and David Foster Wallace. There, it’s practically a prerequisite to becoming a novelist in the first place: some publishers won’t look at the work of an author without one. 

Bradbury, meanwhile, regarded his UEA degree as having almost single-handedly changed the shape of the British literary landscape. While chairman of the Booker Prize in 1981, he gave a speech arguing that UEA writers such as McEwan and Angela Carter “have shifted the novel away from the median realism and provincialism that was so influential in the 1950s, towards largeness, moral strangeness, fantasy and grotesquerie”.

Of course, criticism of these courses has raged for as long as they have existed. Some people accuse them of now producing interchangeable writers and “cookie-cutter prose”. Because nearly all involve fees, they are also accused of elitism and prioritising the white-middle-class experience, although with many courses now promoting diversity and inclusion, that’s no longer so much the case. 

Most profoundly, they are accused of legitimising a culture of prescribed ideas and expectations, in which students of variable talent assume that merely by completing a course that tells them how to write, they can become a writer; that they legitimise the delusion that everyone has a novel in them somewhere, and thus enlarge the dreary sea of mediocrity churned out by today’s self-publishing industry.

Yet the truth is that the best creative-writing courses increasingly do the job that the editors in our publishing houses used to do: selecting the best and shuffling out the rest. Unlike publishing houses, they also place an emphasis on old-fashioned technique, rather than on the ideology of the day. They embody a paradox: that writing can be taught, but that only the most talented can become writers. 

The truth of that is in the pudding. Fiction needs visionaries such as Bradbury to push it towards the large, the strange, the fantastical and the grotesque – and to find and cultivate our best writers. It would be an irony of the most absurd, depressing sort if the institution that made modern British fiction a force to be reckoned with on the world stage is the very one now threatening to diminish its reputation.

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Creative Writing: Scriptwriting

Entry requirements.

Degree Subject - Any Subject

Degree Classification - Bachelors (Hons) degree (2.1 or equivalent preferred)

For more information please see our website .

Months of entry

Course content.

The scriptwriting strand of our world-renowned MA Creative Writing has three core modules.

First, Dramaturgy, in which you’ll study the core conventions of drama as explored from Aristotle to McKee and as embodied in a range of plays, films, and TV programmes, from Antigone to I May Destroy You.

You will also take part in the Scriptwriting workshop, building upon your study of dramaturgical theory, where each week you will benefit from the scrutiny and feedback of your fellow writers and workshop leaders, such as the renowned scriptwriters Steve Waters, Timberlake Wertenbaker, Molly Naylor, Ben Musgrave, and Sian Evans. You’ll incorporate this theory into your own writing practice in weekly creative development workshops, completing scriptwriting and planning exercises. Over the course of the workshop, you and your fellow writers will bring your exercises to the group for discussion and evaluation.

You’ll then go on to study the Process module, where you will explore the differing contexts of scriptwriting across media and develop a script for your choice of medium, building an idea from concept to realisation and exploring the modes of script development that are common practice for working writers.

Over the summer, you’ll also write a dissertation, under the supervision of a member of our faculty.

Information for international students

For more information for international students, please go to UEA’s website .

Fees and funding

Find out more about UEA’s fees and funding options .

Qualification, course duration and attendance options

• Campus-based learning is available for this qualification

Course contact details