At the heart of the Manchester Writing School are our masters programmes in Creative Writing, available to study on campus in Manchester and also from anywhere in the world via online distance learning. On our Master of Arts (MA) Creative Writing programme, you will explore and practice techniques and styles of modern and contemporary writing and apply these through the development of your own creative work. You will undertake a taught element blending writing workshops with reading units and an elective, and then complete your studies through submission of an extended piece of writing from a proposed full-length book or script. The MA is available to complete in one year full-time or two years part-time. This course is available to study on campus (full-time or part-time) or online (part-time only). We have intakes to the programme in September and January each year.

Career prospects

More than 100 of our students and graduates have embarked upon publishing careers, launching first books, with others achieving publication in journals and magazines, winning writing awards and prizes, and setting up small presses and anthologies, and seeing their work go into production and performance. Our alumni include winners of the Costa First Novel Award, Forward Poetry Prize and Yale Windham-Campell Prize, and a long-listing for the Man Booker Prize.

Our School plays a leading role in establishing Manchester as a city of writers with a commitment to finding diverse new voices and creating opportunities for writer development, enabling new writing and building audiences for the next generation of talent. Manchester has been designated a UNESCO City of Literature in recognition of its thriving live literature scene, with a year-round programme of author events, writers’ forums, networking opportunities and open mic nights.

We are home to a suite of ground-breaking outreach projects including the Manchester Children’s Book Festival and Mother Tongue Other Tongue, an international multilingual poetry competition that celebrates cultural diversity and the many languages spoken in schools in the UK. Our Manchester Poetry Library holds over 12,000 books and recordings that can be explored through our online catalogue, in person and through our annual events programme. Our School has a strong Manchester presence, with links to many of the city’s major cultural and arts organisations, and also a global reach with students and alumni based across the UK and continental Europe, and in the Americas, Africa, Asia and Australasia.