Programme description

Our PhD Creative Writing programme gives you the opportunity to work on a significant piece of creative writing while developing your research skills.

You will benefit from creative supervision by an experienced poet or fiction writer and draw on the range of expertise within the University to find a supervisor for your critical element.

There are two elements to the programme. The first is a creative element that can be a novel or a collection of short stories of up to 100,000 words, or a book-length collection of poetry of up to 60 poems.

The PhD also has a critical element, which is a piece of literary or cultural criticism of 30,000 to 50,000 words maximum.

Teaching and learning

The PhD will require you to develop your research skills and, to this end, you will be able to undertake a research skills audit and attend seminars and workshops on research methods in the first year.

In this way, you will participate in training seminars across the field of arts, languages and cultures, which will develop useful research, teaching and IT skills.

You will also attend seminars in relation to publication, authors' rights etc, which will be particularly useful to students of creative writing.

Specialised research training, and a wider postgraduate research culture within which your work will develop, is given through a programme of writing workshop masterclasses in which students take it in turns to have their writing workshopped by the other Creative Writing PhD students, supervisors and visiting writers from outside the institution.

Coursework and assessment

The PhD will normally consist of an extended and original piece of creative work and a shorter piece of literary or cultural criticism on a related subject.

The creative element could be a novel, a collection of poems, or collection of short stories. For fiction writers, the word length of this section will normally be around 80,000 words (there is a maximum word length of 100,000 words).

Career opportunities

Completing a doctoral programme in the Department of English, American Studies and Creative Writing at the University of Manchester opens up a number of different career paths:

Former doctoral students have secured academic positions, both nationally and internationally, teaching and researching at Royal Holloway University of London, the University of Notre Dame, the University of Bangor, Liverpool Hope University, Instabul Sehir University, Salford University, Birmingham City University, Cardiff University, Manchester Metropolitan University, Nottingham Trent University, the University of Leeds, the University of Sheffield, the University of Kent, and the University of Amsterdam.