Creative Writing BA(Hons) Degree

Course outline

Stage 1

• Introduction to Literary Studies I
• Introduction to Cultural Theory
• The Craft of Writing
• The Knowing Self: Literature & Culture (1540-1688)
• Critical Practices
• Creative Writing Strategies: Craft & Criticism 

Stage 2

• Freedom & Experiment: Literature & Culture (1688-1832)
• Creative Writing Strategies: Genre & Form
• Making Nations: Literature & Culture (1832-1914)
• Creative Writing Strategies: Audience & Context

Options include*:

• Poetry & Form
• Writing Short Stories
• Writing Lyrics
• Writing for Radio
• Screen Writing
• Writing a Novel
• Writing for Theatre
• Different Engines: Science Fiction

* You can also choose certain modules listed in the English degree. 

Stage 3

• Aftermaths: Literature & Culture (1914-1968)
• To The Millennium & Beyond: Literature & Culture (1968-present)
• Portfolio (and critical essay)

Options include:

• Business & Editorial Writing
• Writing for a Digital Age
• Travel Writing
• Mass Market Fictions
• Creative Non-Fiction
• Poetry for Publication & Performance
• Writing for Children
• Pitching for Publication

Tell me more about the BA(Hons) Creative Writing course

English at Falmouth has a reputation for excellent teaching, innovative courses and for producing graduates equipped to succeed in a highly competitive global marketplace. In the 2010 National Student Survey, English and Writing achieved 87% in terms of overall student satisfaction.

We now offer three undergraduate courses, providing you with greater choice and an increased focus on employability. Falmouth gives you the opportunity to develop your skills and knowledge in what you'd expect from a traditional and rigorous English department, but with an innovative contemporary twist. Our flexible approach also means you can transfer between courses in Levels 1 and 2, shaping your own pathway according to your specific areas of interest*.

All of the courses have responded to the changing nature of writing practices in the digital age. By using some of the best facilities and digital media resources in the UK, you'll be encouraged to promote your work, skills, and knowledge through developing and managing your digital profile.

The uniqueness and vibrancy of creative arts at Falmouth; the University College's growing reputation for innovative research; and the interdisciplinary opportunities arising from collaborations among the Departments of Writing, Media and Performance all make UCF the ideal environment in which to study for a degree in English or Creative Writing.

* You'll be expected to take at least one semester on the course in which you wish to specialise in Level 3.

By choosing to study for a degree in Creative Writing at Falmouth you will:

• Benefit from being taught by an approachable and experienced team of academics and published writers, who are specialists in their given fields.
• Benefit from courses that are unique, distinctive and highly flexible.
• Benefit from guest lectures and workshops from nationally renowned creative writers, literary experts and media professionals.
• Focus on your own practice, informed by the study of literature and culture across a wide range of texts and authors.
• Be able to tailor your degree to your own specialist interests and for your chosen career or postgraduate destination.
• Be assessed through a combination of coursework, project work, formal presentations, portfolio work and dissertations.

How is the course taught?

The first year will provide you with grounding in the craft and criticism needed by all writers. The second and final years will help you gain an informed understanding of genre leading into engagement with audiences. The course offers a broad range of optional units, enabling you to explore and specialise in subjects that interest you and which may be useful for your chosen career or postgraduate destination.

The course operates on a basis of continuous assessment (including essays, reviews, presentations and creative pieces). You'll produce a portfolio that demonstrates skills in a range of writing styles, genres and techniques. You'll also develop specific IT skills needed in today's marketplace and undertake independent research leading to a creatively informed dissertation.

Assessment

• Coursework
• Portfolio
• Oral assessment
• Project work
• Dissertation in your final year 

Facilities

The Learning Resource Centres at Woodlane and Tremough provide extensive resources for study, creativity and inspiration within an integrated learning environment for all students, including:

• A specialist art and graphic design library with wide-ranging collections including 50,000 books, e-resources and journals.
• Our Media and Design collections. 
• An extensive collection to meet all students' needs, including 100,000 books, a wide range of journals, online and electronic resources, and specialist video and DVD collections. 
• A service allowing items to be transferred between sites.

Career opportunities

Our graduates are now working in a range of careers including publishing, screenwriting, novel writing, journalism, public relations, marketing, web editing, teaching, research and arts administration. Postgraduate study is a further option.

Course publications

WiTH magazine

At University College Falmouth, we believe all good writing is creative and that it underpins and informs all the subject areas on offer to our students, just as literary and media theory underpin and inform creative writing. So whether studying topics such as Creative Writing and Cultural Criticism, Science and Literature, The Gothic and Grotesque, Creative Non-Fiction, or genrebased units such as Writing Fiction, Writing for Radio or Poetry & Form, our students’ work is rooted in writing and reading, discussion and debate, close reading, contextualisation and creative response.

WiTH magazine came out of a growing excitement among our students body about what they had written, and a desire to share and showcase it with others in the university. In the last two years five issues of the magazine have been produced, but the paperback volume, WiTH6, is our formal launch issue and includes some highlights of previous issues along with much previously unpublished work.

WiTH6 (456.97 KB)

WiTH8

Books by BA(Hons) Creative Writing lecturers

Wildlife

Rupert Loydell

www.shearsman.com

In these mercurial poems, real and imaginary events combine with overheard, quoted and misquoted voices to produce a slippery and unreliable series of opinionated poems. What appear at first to be heartfelt confessions reveal themselves to be exercises in ventriloquism, argumentative fictions that seek to subvert and surprise the reader. This poetry is a different kind of beast to what you might have expected.

"Wildlife reveals a tangible life lived: through friendships, family, in the company of other poets and artists. A life lived reading and writing poetry, always thinking, rethinking, questioning, and collaging experience into meaning. Sometimes a life of uncertainty and doubt, in which others 'drift through life / without touching the sides in contrast to my friction burns'. But always a life of warm and engaging humour: a man 'unqualified' to dream; another teaching himself Lithuanian 'translating his misunderstanding'; and the many surprising twists of image and language in the rhetorical variations of 'Animals Are Not Your Friends'. It urges its readers: Enjoy Your Wild Life."
Andy Brown

"Through plain and stark language, Loydell creates a poetics of inner chaos which speaks for modern humanity. With his scalpel he reveals the emptiness at the heart of outwardly successful lives, meditates on death's sneaky approach and calls everything we hold dear into question."
Angela Topping

A Music Box of Snakes

Peter Gillies & Rupert Loydell

In A Music Box of Snakes Peter Gillies and Rupert Loydell refuse to pay lip service to the art world. Instead, these two painter-poets question, critique and challenge what they see as they roam around art galleries and museums, cross-examining each artistic reputation they meet. Throwing a revealing light on illusive personalities of the art establishment, Gillies & Loydell fall out with and sometimes make-up with a number of painters, sculptors, photographers, film makers and performance artists whose work they encounter and consider.

These are witty, sardonic and enthused poems which, underneath the exuberant wordplay, explore language and art, along with notions of creativity and self, in a remarkably informed, insightful and tongue-in-cheek way. 

The Fantasy Kid

Rupert Loydell

Rupert Loydell's new book of poems for children and the young-at-heart has just been published by Salt.

The Fantasy Kid contains poems which have all been test-driven by the author at schools, festivals, libraries and readings around the country.

Whether pondering questions about the nature of chocolate, serenading slugs, saying goodbye to a starfish, or introducing us to Doctor Fizz and Alvin the Aardvaark, these poems are witty, irreverent, memorable and odd.

From Hepworth's Garden Out

Poems about painters and St. Ives
Rupert Loydell (Ed.)

From Rupert Loydell's first visit to this small Cornish harbour town, he, along with many others, has been fascinated by the combination of sea, light, people and painting that constitute St. Ives.

These themes, along with tourism & trade, myth and the nature of creativity itself, are the subject of this anthology. From Hepworth's Garden Out has at its heart the sculptor Barbara Hepworth's garden and studio, now run by the Tate as a small museum. It is a secluded and magical place, however full of visitors, and it is from this small green oasis and its stone and metal inhabitants that this book starts its winding journey. 

Troubles Swapped for Something Fresh

Manifestos and Unmanifestos
Rupert Loydell (Ed.)

Edited by Rupert Loydell, Troubles Swapped for Something Fresh is an eclectic and exciting gathering of poetry and prose-poems that try to understand what poetry is and who or what it might be for. It is also about what writers might want or demand from poetry, in either a general or personal way.

Guest lectures

Below is a list of speakers from the guest lecture series:

• Dr Bryony Randall, University of Glasgow, a leading national expert on Virginia Woolf
• Dr Clarissa Smith - on her recent book
• Dr Shamira Meghani, University of Sussex - on Sexuality, Nationalism and Bollywood film
• Jean McNeil, novelist - on her experience as writer in residence for a scientific exploration of the Arctic
• Phil Terry, poet - on the Oulipo writing project
• Andy Brown, poet, novelist - on ecopoetics
• Tony Lopez - on WS Graham and St Ives artists
• Nicholas Royle, novelist - Craft of Writing 1
• Peter Blegvad, singersongwriter, lecturer - Writing Lyrics
• David Grubb, poet, novelist - Craft of Writing 1 and 2
• Martin Stannard, poet - Poetry & Form
• Phil Bowen, poet, comedian - Poetry & Form + open performance
• Luke Kennard, poet, playwright - Poetry & Form + open performance
• Tony Lopez, poet, critic, lecturer - Craft of Writing 2
• Penelope Shuttle, poet, novelist - Craft of Writing 2
• Allen Fisher, poet, critic, lecturer - Craft of Writing
• Sam Richards, ethnomusicologist, lecturer - Writing Lyrics

Professorial lecture series

Falmouth's Professorial lecture series aims to produce an engaging and challenging public programme that stimulates the intellectual curiosity of our staff, students and alumni, our research collaborators, our industry partners, our local communities and other supporters. Recent lectures include Andrew Chitty and Emily Bell.

Andrew Chitty

Seven myths that drive the digital economy

Andrew has been a pioneer in the converging worlds of TV and digital media since the mid 90s when as Editor of BBC2's The Net he was responsible for the BBC's first website and virtual world. Since 1998 he's built Illumina Digital into the UK's leading cross platform production company winning a raft of awards including 4 BAFTAS, 8 RTS Awards, The UN award for e-learning and even a Golden Ladle for the world's best cookery site. In 2008 Illumina joined All3Media, the UK's largest independent production group.

Andrew has been active in policy and industry groups, co-authoring OFCOM's paper New Options for Public Service in the Digital Age and has advised Lord Stephen Carter as a member of the ministerial steering board for the Digital Britain Report. He is a council member of PACT, trustee of TRC Media in Glasgow and a past board member of Skillset. Andrew is currently Chair of the National Skills Council for Digital Media.

A video of Andrew Chitty's lecture can be viewed online here

Download the transcript of Andrew Chitty's lecture (175.81 KB)

Emily Bell

Back To the News Future: Journalism 10 Years from Now

Director of Digital Content for Guardian News and Media, Emily set up www.mediaguardian.co.uk in 2001. www.guardian.co.uk has won multiple awards, including the prestigious Webby for Best Newspaper on the web in 2005, 2006 and 2007. Oxford graduate, Bell is one of the rising stars coming through from a younger, more web-focused generation of senior media figures.

A video of Emily Bell's lecture can be viewed online here

A decade of English at Falmouth

In 2008, graduates celebrated the tenth anniversary of BA(Hons) English at Falmouth. Over the last decade, the course has grown from a small part time course to one of the largest undergraduate departments at the institution with over 200 full time students.

The reunion event included a small showcase of work from 2008 graduates and the official launch of our student anthology: ‘WiTH' magazine. A jazz band then welcomed alumni into the beautiful Italian Garden of Tremough House for drinks, a barbeque and party.

Photographs from the event can be viewed here

Answers and advice about the course

For further information about BA(Hons) Creative Writing at University College Falmouth, please email admissions@falmouth.ac.uk or telephone Admissions on 01326 255764.

Our student mentors are now on Facebook. To chat to a mentor about the course, living in Cornwall, or what to expect at Falmouth, check out the English courses group. You need to join the group before you can post. Our student mentors have already done the first year of the course... so ask them anything you like!

English courses Facebook group

If you're not Facebook you can still speak to a student mentor. Email your name and the course you're starting to: studentmentorenquiries@falmouth.ac.uk and we will be in touch with you.

Entry requirements

A minimum of 220 UCAS points, equivalent Level 3 qualifications or relevant experience. All applicants to the English courses will be invited to a two-part interview. No portfolio is required.

Please see our How to Apply page for more information.

For further information about BA(Hons) Creative Writing at University College Falmouth, please email admissions@falmouth.ac.uk or telephone Admissions on 01326 255764.

Interview and selection process

All applicants will be invited to interview. There will be a group and individual interview. You will not be required to bring a portfolio to the interview. Interviews will take place at either 10.30am or 2.30pm.

Interviews will be held on 21, 22, 28 and 29 February, 6, 7, 13, 14 March, 17 and 18 April 2012

Location: Tremough Campus

Related courses

• English BA(Hons)
• English with Creative Writing BA(Hons)
• Journalism BA(Hons)