MA Regional Writing

Are you a writer interested in exploring regional identities? Have you a writing project idea that focuses upon the relationship between people, place, and the histories of the landscape? Perhaps you are interested in digital regions, mapping regions of the body, how notions of regionality apply to gender, to technology, to time and space. Regional writing can be as much about your local area as it can a global environment, a cultural pocket, or a rural enclosure. It might even be other-worldly and set in the future. This taught MA will help you realise your creative ambitions to reflect and represent the stories significant to you. Perhaps you wish to retell the stories associated with a specific place or to reimagine lives confined by borders. The main aim is for you to develop the skills to compose creative work in a variety of forms and mediums, and to understand why we, as writers, should keep celebrating the regional and the regional voice.

This programme will feature 2 semester long modules, group project work with an external partner assisting in their regional agenda, a symposium that you will help to organise and culminating in a dissertation project. You will be expected to produce written materials for weekly workshop and provide critical feedback upon your peers, sometimes in response to lecture and seminar content. All practice will be underpinned by an exploration of your creative process, the techniques and devices employed, and you will be encouraged to keep a writer’s journal as a personal trajectory and ongoing evaluation of your work.

You will be taught by practising writers with national reputations in regional writing who are passionate about nurturing new and underrepresented voices, alongside guest authors and industry experts. We will encourage you to reach publishable standard with your work, whilst alerting you to the various career pathways available to you upon graduation.