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What makes Creative Writing and English Literature at Worcester special?

Studying a joint honours degree in Creative Writing and English Literature provides the opportunity to combine your development as a writer with academic study of literary texts. You’ll explore complementary yet contrasting approaches to thinking about writing and the dynamic, multi-faceted contexts of its production.

The course provides a supportive and collaborative environment for you to analyse the approaches and techniques used by various authors and apply them to your own writing. Students graduate with critical thinking skills and a portfolio of work that demonstrates communication skills that are in demand across multiple jobs and industries.

Overview

Overview

Key features

  • The chance for students to publish their work from the very first week and throughout their undergraduate programme
  • Opportunities to play an active role in local and regional literature festivals, related events and a work project module
  • Study diverse literatures emanating from the sixteenth through to present day – and encompassing both ‘canonical’ and ‘marginal’ texts
  • Experience in writing for a range of digital, print, audio, visual and performance platforms
  • Tailor your course to your individual needs with a joint honours degree
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Joint 10th for Graduate Prospects in the UK

Our English courses are joint 10th for Graduate Prospects in the UK (The Complete University Guide 2024.)

Entry requirements

Entry requirements

104
UCAS tariff points

Entry requirements

104 UCAS Tariff points.

The normal minimum entry requirement for undergraduate degree courses is the possession of 4 GCSEs (Grade C/4 or above) and a minimum of 2 A Levels, including a minimum grade of C at A2 English.

Other information

We also encourage mature and International applicants to apply with relevant qualifications and/or experience.

If you have any questions about entry requirements, please contact the Admissions Office on 01905-855111 or email admissions@worc.ac.uk for advice.

Further information about the UCAS Tariff can be found on the UCAS website.

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Course content

Course content

Our courses are informed by research and current developments in the discipline and feedback from students, external examiners and employers. Modules do therefore change periodically in the interests of keeping the course relevant and reflecting best practice. The most up-to-date information will be available to you once you have accepted a place and registered for the course. If there are insufficient numbers of students interested in an optional module, this might not be offered, but we will advise you as soon as possible and help you choose an alternative. 

Year 1

Mandatory

  • Introduction to Writing
  • Writing Poetry
  • Writing Fiction
  • Literary Forms and Genres
  • Ways of Reading, Ways of Writing
  • Writing Worcester Past and Present

Year 2

Mandatory

  • Exploding the Canon: Literary Theory and Practice
  • Writer as Researcher

Optional

  • The Writing Professional
  • Collabowriting
  • Environmental Writing
  • Writing for Children
  • Slam, Spoken Word, and Performance Poetry
  • Genre Fiction
  • Work Project Module
  • Movement and Migration
  • Politics, Sex and Identity in the Early Modern World
  • Shakespeare: Stage, Page and Screen
  • Gothic and Romantic Literature
  • Spaces of Modernity
  • Children’s Literature
  • Work Project

Year 3

Optional

  • Extended Writing Project
  • Hypermedia - Creative Writing in a Digital Culture
  • New Nature Writing
  • Contemporary Poetry
  • Creative Non-Fiction
  • Indie Publishing
  • Writing Witchcraft
  • International Exchanges
  • Writing for Performance
  • Independent Research Project
  • Justice and Revenge: from Tragedy to the Western
  • Postcolonial Encounters
  • Writing and the Environment
  • War and Conflict
  • Gendering Voices
  • Partnership and Rivalries
  • Literatures and Cultures: International Explorations
  • Queer Bodies, Queer Texts
  • Literature and Culture - Local Heritage
2 female students and 1 male student working at table

Joint Honours

Discover our full range of joint degrees and read about how your degree will be structured.

Find out more about studying a joint honours course
Teaching and assessment

Teaching and assessment

For more information about teaching, learning and assessment on this course, please see the single honours course pages for Creative Writing BA (Hons) and English Literature BA (Hons).

Programme specifications

For comprehensive details on the aims and intended learning outcomes of the course, and the means by which these are achieved through learning, teaching and assessment, please download the latest Creative Writing programme specification and English Literature programme specification documents.

Throughout my studies I always felt supported by academic staff who were encouraging, responsive and passionate about their subjects.

Toni Brookes, English Literature Graduate

Studying for a Joint Honours degree in Creative Writing and English Literature gives you the opportunity to combine your own development as a writer with academic study of literary texts in English. The two courses offer complementary yet contrasting approaches to thinking about writing and the dynamic, multi-faceted contexts of its production - from those of Shakespeare or Zora Neale Hurston, for example, to those of your world, today.

Creative Writing aims to nurture your confidence as a writer and to support your development as a critical and skilful analyst of your own and others’ writing. Throughout, you will be immersed in intellectual issues informing the discipline and practices of writing and learn to place your own writing within contexts of published work. You will develop expertise in commercial practice (writing for magazines, reviewing, scriptwriting, editing) and understanding of publishing and marketing processes alongside working towards your own, creative development.

You will work with published writers, professional publishers and editors with a variety of specialisms including poetry, travel writing, writing for the screen, writing fiction, writing for performance, writing for children, feature writing, blogging and copy writing. Your development and achievements will be assessed by means of a wide variety of writing ‘tasks.’ In your third year, you will undertake a major writing project of your choice, mentored by members of the course team, alongside participating in a range of activity designed to support you to prepare for progression once you have graduated.

English Literature provides opportunities to explore literatures from the 16th to 21st centuries, embracing both mainstream, ‘canonical’ and less familiar, ‘marginal’ texts. It invites you to share with your lecturers cutting-edge thinking in spheres as diverse as Shakespeare in performance, children’s literature, contemporary American writing and ecocriticism (the understanding of literary texts through exploration of the interconnections between human culture and organic and animal worlds).

From the outset, you will develop skills of close and creative reading, as well as a critical awareness of the relationship between texts and their contexts. Increasingly as the course progresses, you will explore literature from a range of theoretical perspectives current throughout the humanities. This, in turn, will support you to specialise in the areas of literature that interest you most. There are also opportunities to explore relationships between literature and other kinds of expression, for example painting and illustration.

Studying these subjects in combination will be an exciting prospect if you like both academic study and creative, practical work - and if reading, writing and ‘contemporary’ cultural forms are what excite your curiosity (with ‘contemporary’ embracing not just the culture of your today but of diverse others, from readers and writers in 17th century England to those of early 20th century America).

Meet the team

You will be taught by a teaching team whose expertise and knowledge are closely matched to the content of the modules on the course.

Dr Jack McGowan

Dr Jack McGowan

Jack’s research focuses on contemporary poetry and poetics, and he specializes in the development of performance poetry in the UK since the mid-20th century, and the oral roots of poetry.

Jack is a performance poet with 10 years of experience on the UK spoken word scene and he writes for both performance and page publication.

Dr Lucy Arnold

Dr Lucy Arnold is a specialist in Contemporary literature, with particular research interests in contemporary gothic, narratives of haunting, contemporary women’s writing and psychoanalytic criticism. Her teaching experience spans a wide range of periods and genres but focusses on twentieth and twenty-first century literature. Her published work to date has concerned the writing of Booker Prize winning novelist Hilary Mantel, with her monograph, Reading Hilary Mantel: Haunted Decades, published with Bloomsbury in 2019.

Dr Sharon Young

Dr Sharon Young is a  Fellow of the HEA and her teaching interests include, Renaissance, Restoration and eighteenth-century literature, women's poetry, and literary theory.

Sharon's research focuses mainly on women's poetry of the early modern period, Renaissance revenge tragedy and women's manuscript culture. Sharon has published on female poets and the critical debates of the early eighteenth century and Mary Leapor. 

Professor Nicoleta Cinpoes, Head of English, Media & Culture

Professor Nicoleta Cinpoes

Nicoleta Cinpoes joined the University of Worcester in 2007. She teaches Renaissance Literature, is International Exchanges Liaison for the School of Humanities and co-director of Worcester's Early Modern Research Group.

She has edited Doing Kyd: A Collection of Critical Essays on the Spanish Tragedy for Manchester University Press (2016) and is currently collaborating on a new Romanian translation of Shakespeare's complete works, writing introductions to Hamlet (2010), Titus Andronicus, Measure for Measure, The Merchant of Venice and The Comedy of Errors.

Dr David Arnold, Senior Lecturer in English Literature

Dr David Arnold

David Arnold trained as a Classicist before moving on to doctoral work on twentieth-century American poetry. His research and teaching interests lie in poetry, American literature, ecocriticism and narrative criticism. He has published articles on the literary improvisations of William Carlos Williams and a book on American poetry: Poetry and Language Writing: Objective and Surreal (Liverpool University Press, 2007). His recent work focuses on ecophenomenological readings of modernist writing, and Buddhist American Poetry.

David teaches at undergraduate and postgraduate levels and has responsibility for modules in Literary Theory and American Writing. David is a member of both the British Association of American Studies and the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. He is also a member of the Green Voices Research Group.

Professor Jean Webb, Professor of International Children's Literature

Professor Jean Webb

Jean Webb is Director of the International Forum for Research in Childrens Literature which provides a focus for literary, cultural and socio-historical scholarly enquiry into writing for children, internationally. She teaches a broad range of undergraduate modules on nineteenth and twentieth century literature, and is responsible for specialist modules in children's literature. She is also an experienced PhD supervisor and examiner.

Dr Whitney Standlee, Senior Lecturer in English Literature

Dr Whitney Standlee

Dr Whitney Standlee is a specialist in literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with particular research interests in Irish women’s writing and migrant literature. Her publications include two recent books on the subject of Irish women’s writing.

Whitney teaches on a range of core and elective modules at all levels, all of which deal at least in part with nineteenth- and early twentieth century literature.

Ruth Stacey Profile Image

Ruth Stacey

Ruth is based in Bredon 190. As Admissions Tutor for Creative Writing she is responsible for processing new applications for study and recruitment of new students. This includes attending open days, organising events, visiting schools and colleges, and collecting student testimonials for the Creative Writing blog.

A prize-winning writer, Ruth is interested in reclaiming maligned or forgotten voices in her work, combining historical research with imagined memoir to create a new document that allows a different perspective on the historical person. Ruth is currently writing symbolist poetry as part of her research for her PhD at the University of Northumbria.  The creative aspect of the project is an imagined memoir of the tarot artist Pamela Colman Smith.

Ruth is widely published and has taught literature and writing to all age groups, including in schools and with Writing West Midlands youth groups. An experienced freelance writer and copywriter, Ruth also helped to start the indie press V.Press and worked as the illustrator for the press for seven years.

Careers

Careers

The Creative and Professional Writing element of the course will provide a foundation for students who are interested in developing writing as a profession, for example in the creative industries and/or commercial markets and an understanding of how writers make a living. Graduates may equally go on to work in sectors such as publishing, the media, marketing and communications. The course also provides an excellent basis for further study or for self-employment as a freelance writer.

Graduates from this course will be very successful candidates for careers in teaching because of the emphasis on writing in the new English curricula. Many English Literature graduates will take a fourth year postgraduate Certificate in Education before entering the teaching profession. Other students will take a certificate in TEFL and become teachers of English as a second language at home or abroad.

Those graduates who achieve particularly good results in their first degree will choose to progress to a Masters course, which will then often lead to a career as a researcher or further study to PhD. Many students progress to careers requiring good communication skills such as Public Relations or develop research careers with media or publishing companies.

Throughout the English Literature element of the course, there is a focus on developing employability which includes attractive opportunities for work experience on an optional work project module. Students are also strongly encouraged to take up the opportunity to study abroad for a semester.

Costs

Fees and funding

Full-time tuition fees

UK and EU students

The standard fee for full-time home and EU undergraduate students enrolling on BA/BSc/LLB degrees and FdA/FdSc degrees in the 2024/25 academic year is £9,250 per year.

For more details, please visit our course fees page.

International students

The standard tuition fee for full-time international students enrolling on BA/BSc/LLB degrees and FdA/FdSc degrees in the 2024/25 academic year is £16,200 per year.

For more details, please visit our course fees page.

Part-time tuition fees

UK and EU students

The standard tuition fees for part-time UK and EU students enrolling on BA/BSc/LLB degrees and FdA/FdSc degrees in the academic year 2024/25 are £1,156 per 15-credit module, £1,542 per 20-credit module, £2,312 per 30-credit module, £3,083 per 40-credit module, £3,469 per 45-credit module and £4,625 per 60 credit module.

For more details, please visit our course fees page.

Additional costs

Every course has day-to-day costs for basic books, stationery, printing and photocopying. The amounts vary between courses.

If your course offers a placement opportunity, you may need to pay for an Enhanced Disclosure & Barring Service (DBS) check.

Accommodation

Finding the right accommodation is paramount to your university experience. Our halls of residence are home to friendly student communities, making them great places to live and study.

We have over 1,000 rooms across our range of student halls. With rooms to suit every budget and need, from our 'Traditional Hall' at £131 per week to 'En-suite Premium' at £221 per week (2024/25 prices).

For full details visit our accommodation page.

How to apply

How to apply

Creative & Professional Writing and English Literature BA (Hons) - WQ82

UCAS is the central organisation through which applications are processed for entry onto full-time undergraduate courses in Higher Education in the UK.

Read our How to apply pages for more information on applying and to find out what happens to your application.

UCAS Code

WQ82

Get in touch

If you have any questions, please get in touch. We're here to help you every step of the way.

Ruth Stacey

Admissions Tutor, Creative Writing

Dr Sharon Young

Admissions Tutor, English Literature