Creative Writing MA

All successful applicants who take up their place with us in September will be entered into our competition to have a consultation with Annabel White, an agent at top London literary agency Curtis Brown.

So make sure the creative work you submit with your application is your very best – it might win you a meeting with a literary agent.

When not attending timetabled sessions, you will be expected to continue learning independently through self-study. This typically involves reading and analysing articles, regulations, policy documents and key texts, documenting individual projects and preparing coursework assignments.

Your independent learning is supported by a range of excellent facilities including online resources, the library and CANVAS, the University's online virtual learning platform.

At Kingston University, we know that postgraduate students have particular needs and therefore we have a range of support available to help you during your time here.

A course is made up of modules, and each module is worth a number of credits. You must pass a given number of credits in order to achieve the award you registered on, for example 360 credits for a typical undergraduate course or 180 credits for a typical postgraduate course. The number of credits you need for your award is detailed in the programme specification which you can access from the link at the bottom of this page.

One credit equates to 10 hours of study. Therefore 180 credits across a year (typical for a postgraduate course) would equate to 1,800 notional hours. These hours are split into scheduled and guided. On this course, the percentage of that time that will be scheduled learning and teaching activities is shown below. The remainder is made up of guided independent study.

• 6% scheduled learning and teaching

The exact balance between scheduled learning and teaching and guided independent study will be informed by the modules you take.

Your course will primarily be delivered in person. It may include delivery of some activities online, either in real time or recorded.

100% coursework.

We aim to provide feedback on assessments within 20 working days.

The Inspire the Future Scholarship offers a 40% reduction in fees for taught masters or postgraduate diploma courses with September start dates. 20 scholarships are available for progressing Kingston University graduates.

For more information on how to apply for this scholarship, visit the Inspire the Future Scholarship page.

International postgraduate students could receive up to £5,000 towards tuition in their first year of study.

For more information on how to apply for these scholarships, visit the International Scholarship page.

If you are a Kingston University undergraduate student progressing to a postgraduate degree (taught or research), you could get a 15% reduction in tuition fees.

For more information on how to apply for this scholarship, visit the Postgraduate Progression Scholarship page.

Kingston University offers a 10% discount on full and part-time postgraduate degree course tuition fees to our alumni.

For more information on how to apply for this discount, visit our postgraduate finance page.

Our libraries have an extensive collection of books and journals, as well as open-access computers and laptops available to rent. However, you may want to buy your own computer or personal copies of key textbooks. Textbooks may range from £50 to £250 per year. And a personal computer can range from £100 to £3,000 depending on your course requirements.

While most coursework is submitted online, some modules may require printed copies. You may want to allocate up to £100 per year for hard-copies of your coursework. It’s worth noting that 3D printing is never compulsory. So if you choose to use our 3D printers, you’ll need to pay for the material. This ranges from 3p per gram to 40p per gram.

Kingston University will pay for all compulsory field trips. Fees for optional trips can range from £30 to £350 per trip.

Your tuition fees don’t cover travel costs. To save on travel costs, you can use our intersite bus service. This route links the campuses and halls of residence with local train stations - Surbiton, Kingston upon Thames, and Norbiton.

I will always love my time as a Kingston University Creative Writing MA student. The freedom to experiment, the fantastic support from the lecturers, the encouragement to take big, bold swings has helped me create the best work of my career so far. I discovered new interests that I will carry with me for the rest of my life, and only wish I could take the course all over again.

In 2018, I began my practice-based creative writing PhD, specialising in life writing around motherhood experience. This was something of a career change for me, and so I did not have a record of published creative or academic writing. That same year I published a piece of life writing, which had developed out of my work for the PhD application, as a chapter in a book entitled Everyday World-Making: Towards an Understanding of Affect and Mothering.

Later that year I presented the early stages of my research at a conference titled Women in Transition, which lead to another publication, this time a hybrid creative/essay piece in a book based on the conference.

Over the next couple of years, I wrote and presented elements of my practice and research at Writers Centre Kingston events, and at a conference organised by the Race/Gender Matters research group at Kingston. Following this conference, I joined the research group and went on to co-organise a Race/Gender Matters symposium entitled Visceral Bodies in 2023.

In 2021, I published a hybrid creative/essay chapter in a book entitled From Band-Aids to Scalpels: Motherhood Experiences in/of Medicine.

Throughout my PhD journey I have also published several pieces in online journals, including Failure: the Ghost and the Mother, Alluvium Journal, 2022, and But Also Flesh and Salt, The Contemporary Journal, 2023.

Recently, I have published poetry on the Dx: Diagnosis and Writing website, and in Motherlore magazine. I am currently co-editing a special issue of Studies in the Maternal journal (with a PhD student from the Philosophy department) based on the Visceral Bodies symposium and featuring my poetry.

The structure, support and networks afforded me by my studies at Kingston have been invaluable in getting my work out into the world.

From the beginning of my doctoral work at Kingston until I submitted my thesis I always felt supported by my supervisors. Their comments on my writing and my meetings with them were very productive. In addition, I received encouragement about my creative work which was a real boost. The University also provided platforms for readings and talks in which I participated – these were wonderful ways to practice for other events in which I have since participated. As I built up and edited my manuscript of poems, they became ready to send out which I did over my years as a PhD student.

Throughout my time at Kingston I published quite a lot of my creative work that came out of my thesis, including poems in various literary journals and a pamphlet of poems, Grief Dialogue (Rack Press). After I submitted my thesis, the manuscript that came out of the critical component was accepted for publication. The book, Boat of Letters, will appear in 2025.

I am quite sure that my publishing journey would have been very difficult were it not for Kingston University MFA.

Tutors like James Miller, Adam Baron, and Jonathan Barnes didn't just give me the nuts and bolts of the craft but also impressed upon me the importance of trusting my own voice, taking responsibility for the story I want to tell and to be flexible in my approach to craft so that I am always learning and growing.

I did the low-res MA in Creative Writing from 2015 to 2017 and it was the perfect fit for someone living outside the UK. The course was excellent on both theoretical and technical aspects, allowing me to figure out how best to write what I wanted to write. I was lucky to have the brilliantly warm and practical Paul Bailey as my dissertation adviser and still apply his insight to everything I write, although I am still guilty of a love of run-on sentences! Course head, Wendy Vaizey, gave me invaluable advice and confidence in my own style at a critical point – advice that saw my first novel subsequently accepted for publication.

Three of us from the class formed our own little writing group when the MA ended and still have a monthly Zoom workshop where we share and discuss our writing and our lives. This fourth novel, Greener, is about friendship and I was so proud to dedicate the book to them both.

The road to publication is paved with blood, coffee and numb fingers; don't let anyone tell you differently. Completing my MA and PhD at Kingston University was a challenging but wholly rewarding experience and one I wouldn't change for the world. The lectures, detailed supervision meetings, and workshopping creative pieces with fellow students were invaluable in taking my writing to the next level. Writing is a lonely profession, so being part of a community that pushes and motivates you to write your best work is special. I honed my skills as a fiction writer and an academic writer throughout my time at Kingston.

For my PhD, I wrote a historical thriller titled Bad Blood, which will be published in 2024 under my pen name, Luke Deckard, by Sharpe Books. This novel is the culmination of my time at Kingston, and not only am I thrilled to see it officially released into the wild, but I know Bad Blood wouldn't be what it is without the support and input I received over the years from my supervisors and colleagues I met and worked with along the way.