Immerse yourself in your writing over three intensive weeks spent in Oxford.
Under the guidance of experienced tutors, you will write, develop your technique, sharpen your critical faculties and discuss your work in small, focused seminars. Each weekday you will attend a talk given by an author, publisher, agent, or editor. You will live and work in beautiful Exeter College – founded in 1314 – the environment that nurtured J R R Tolkien, Philip Pullman, Martin Amis, William Morris, and many others.
At the end of your three weeks, you will have acquired new skills, made new friends, and developed a fresh portfolio of creative writing.
The academic programme consists of
- small interactive seminars featuring writing exercises and group discussion;
- guidance by tutors who are both published authors and experienced teachers; and
- daily talks and readings given by established authors, agents, editors and others.
Seminars are offered at two levels (Advanced and Intermediate) - see "Selection Criteria" (below) to ensure a good fit with your experience as a writer.
Advanced applicants choose two seminars from the following writing genres:
- Creative Non-Fiction
- Crime Fiction
- Fiction (two options)
- Poetry
- Scriptwriting
- Short Story
- Teen/Young Adult Fiction.
(See "Programme details", below, for advanced seminar descriptions.)
Intermediate applicants take two mandatory seminars:
Creative Non-Fiction
Writing about real lives and experiences – your own, or someone else’s – is rewarding but also daunting. What if you have too much information, or your story involves other people? How do you fill the gaps? How do you keep the reader reading? What if your core purpose is to write creatively not about a life, but about a specific place or time, journey or sickness, idea or vocation? And when does storytelling tip over into fiction? In this course we will use practical exercises, examples, discussion and the sharing of writing to explore ways of imagining, researching, developing, shaping and voicing real-life material to form a narrative.
Tutor: Emma Darwin’s memoir, This is Not a Book About Charles Darwin (Holland House Books, 2019), explores her disastrous attempt to write a novel about her family. Her debut novel, The Mathematics of Love (Headline Review, 2006), was nominated for the Commonwealth Writers’ and other awards; her second, A Secret Alchemy (Headline Review, 2009), was a Sunday Times bestseller; Get Started in Writing Historical Fiction (John Murray Learning) was published in 2016. She has a PhD in Creative Writing (London) and was an Associate Lecturer at the Open University; she blogs at This Itch of Writing.
Fiction
Want to improve your creative writing? This course will offer you the chance to develop your creative prose in an inspirational and nurturing environment. By looking at techniques used by published writers, we shall learn how we can bring our own stories to life. Practical exercises and discussion of each other's work will deepen our understanding of fundamentals such as character, description, plot, dialogue, point of view and suspense. We shall also experiment with different narrative forms. Last but not least, the course will explore how to rewrite and edit - vital skills for your creative writing in the future.
Tutor: Frank Egerton read English at Keble College, Oxford, and has reviewed fiction for The Times, Times Literary Supplement and Financial Times. He teaches creative writing at undergraduate and postgraduate level for Oxford University. He is the author of The Lock (Smaller Sky Books, 2003) and Invisible (StreetBooks, 2010). He is interested in both the close examination of fiction and how new technologies are changing the publishing industry. The e book edition of The Lock reached the finals of the Independent eBook Awards. He is a former editor of The Oxford Writer and Chair of Writers in Oxford. He has recently completed a work of life writing, entitled Trust: a Family Story.
All seminars will involve writing exercises, group discussion, and the development of a portfolio of creative writing.
Each advanced and intermediate seminar has two two-hour meetings per week. Classes typically contain no more than 14 students.
Contact hours
The programme provides a minimum of 46.5 contact hours, comprising:
- 24 hours of seminar meetings (12 hours per seminar); and
- 22.5 hours of talks and readings (15 sessions, each lasting 1.5 hours).
Social programme
Optional social events are offered throughout the summer school, and may include a walking tour of Oxford, after-dinner talks and weekend excursions to sites of literary and/or historical interest. Most of these activities incur additional costs.
Students will have an opportunity to share their ideas and work with the group at open mic nights (one per week) and informal peer-led workshop sessions (two per week).
Beyond the summer school, Oxford is a vibrant and cosmopolitan city with a busy cultural and social scene offering a wide variety of plays and shows, concerts, films and exhibitions.