Daily schedule
Academic timetable
The academic timetables run from Monday to Friday each week.
For both levels, the programme provides a minimum of 46.5 contact hours, comprising:
- 24 hours of seminar meetings (12 hours per seminar)
- 22.5 hours of talks (15 sessions, each lasting 1.5 hours).
Each seminar has two two-hour meetings per week, and classes typically contain no more than 15 students. All of the seminars involve writing exercises, group discussion, and the development of a portfolio of creative writing.
Students are also expected to complete private study during the course (eg reading, work in libraries, writing papers).
Meals
All meals included in the programme take place in Exeter College's dining hall and are self-service, with a range of options available. The only exceptions are the opening and closing dinners, which are formal served set menu meals.
Details of which meals are included in the residential and non-residential options can be found in the 'accommodation' section.
Social programme
A range of optional social events* will be offered throughout the course. These usually take place in the evenings and weekends and are likely to include:
- walking tour of Oxford
- after-dinner talks and discussions
- weekend excursions to sites of literary and/or historical interest.
You will also have an opportunity to share ideas and work with your fellow students at open mic nights and informal peer-led workshop sessions.
Beyond the summer school, Oxford is a vibrant city with a busy cultural and social scene offering a wide variety of plays, concerts, films and exhibitions.
*Please note: most of these activities incur additional costs.
Intermediate-level seminars
Students take two mandatory seminars as detailed below.
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: Dr Emma Darwin’s memoir, This is Not a Book About Charles Darwin (2019), explores her disastrous attempt to write a novel about her family. Her debut novel, The Mathematics of Love (2006), was nominated for the Commonwealth Writers’ and other awards; her second, A Secret Alchemy (2009), was a Sunday Times bestseller; Get Started in Writing Historical Fiction 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
In this course you will explore who you are as a writer, reflecting on the stories that you see and hear in the stuff of everyday life and thinking about what you, uniquely, can bring to those stories that you choose to tell. We will discover how to depict fictional worlds, characters, relationships, situations and sequences of events so that they seem ‘real’ but at the same time sing on the page and make for compelling reading. To this end, we will be spending our time on writing exercises and discussion - sharing our work, ideas and experiences as and when we are comfortable to do so.
Tutor: Suzannah Dunn has published two collections of short fiction and twelve novels, seven of them historical, one of which, The Confession of Katherine Howard, was a Richard and Judy Pick. Her 13th novel, Levitation for Beginners, was published in 2024. She has decades of experience as a tutor of creative writing in all kinds of settings with writers of all levels of confidence and skills. For five years she was Director of Manchester University’s MA in Novel Writing, and is now a tutor and mentor at Curtis Brown Creative.
Advanced-level seminar options
Advanced-level applicants choose two seminars from the list below. Please check the seminar timetable when choosing your options to ensure they do not clash.
Creative Non-Fiction
We tell stories about ourselves and others every day. Taking a close look at autobiography, memoir, and biography, we will discuss how these stories are told and the extent to which this influences what we think we know about our own lives and those of others. The course will focus on narrative prose. It will provide an opportunity for students to work on an idea for a life story or an existing project. Students will be encouraged to work on their own writing during the course. We will discuss the challenges we all face as writers and how to address them. There will be opportunities to explore contemporary examples of life-writing that challenge traditional autobiographical and biographical narratives and the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction. We will address questions about form and style that help us to decide what kind of narrative we want to write, whether it be a book, an article, or a short life story.
Tutor: Julie Summers is the author of 14 works of non-fiction and was recently listed in the Sunday Times as one of only four women in the top 50 historians in Britain. Her best-selling book, Jambusters, inspired the ITV drama series, Home Fires, which ran for two seasons in 2015-16 and had a regular television audience of over six million. Her Dressed for War is a biography of the wartime editor of Vogue, Audrey Withers (2020). It was optioned by Gaumont TV who are developing it into a drama series. Her biography of British Vogue was published in 2024. She is currently working on a new book about the women of D-Day.
Fiction: Turning Ideas Into Narratives
This course is aimed at those who are starting to write prose but do not yet feel fully confident. Using a variety of exercises and some examples from literature, we shall investigate the formation of character, and develop character arcs. Then we shall develop story and plot outlines together, planning scenes. Finally, we shall attempt to identify and discuss your unique strengths and preferences with a view to finding your USP - unique selling point.
Tutor: Dr Rachel Bentham has been Royal Literary Fellow at Bath University, and teaches for both Bristol and Bath Spa Universities. Her plays and short stories have been regularly broadcast on BBC Radio 4, and her poetry is internationally published. She has recently completed a novel set in nineteenth-century Tahiti. A recent collection of haiku was called Let All Tongues Flower (2013); her most recent collection, also of haiku, is titled Other Roads North (2019) and reached number one on Amazon.
Fiction: Fine-Tuning Your Writing
This course is designed to help you hone your craft as a writer and see your project through to its completion. We shall start by examining your aims and motivation, troubleshooting any problems you are having in maintaining commitment and progress. We shall explore how to give your writing maximum resonance and power, analysing how you can use voice and point of view, give your characters extra depth and weave together story strands, themes and images. Finally, we shall look at sending your work out into the world, with workshopping and advice on editing and pitching.
Tutor: Lorna Fergusson is a writing coach, editor and speaker, author of The Chase and An Oxford Vengeance. She runs Fictionfire Literary Consultancy and has taught on various Oxford University writing programmes since 2002. Her stories have won an Ian St James Award, the Historical Novel Society’s Short Story Award, and been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and Pan Macmillan’s Write Now prize. In 2021 and 2022 she was runner-up for the Mogford Prize. She is developing one of the Mogford stories as a novel, as well as working on poetry and a book on mindset for writers. Her latest book is One Morning in Provence, a collection of stories set in France. Her websites are www.lornafergusson.com and www.fictionfire.co.uk.
Middle-Grade and Teen/Young Adult Fiction
The middle grade and teen/young adult fiction markets are exciting, and rewarding, areas of publishing. This course, run by an established novelist, will look at the way successful writers have chosen subjects and themes, explored fantasy and/or social realism, and found exactly the right voice to appeal to younger readers. It will also explore such key topics as planning, plot development and perspective. Students will be guided in the development of a story of their own, and there will be plenty of opportunities to workshop ideas and get feedback on stories as they progress. PLEASE NOTE: NEW ADULT FICTION IS NOT INCLUDED IN THE CONTENT OF THIS COURSE.
Tutor: Julie Hearn is the critically acclaimed author of a number of novels for young adults, all published by Oxford University Press. Included are: Follow Me Down, shortlisted for the Branford Boase First Novel Award, The Merrybegot, shortlisted for the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize and the Highland Children’s Book Award, and Rowan the Strange, shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal and described by The Guardian as 'nothing short of extraordinary'. Her eighth novel, I am NOT adorable, written for younger children, was published by Jolly Heron in 2018 and a collection of short stories, The Princess Thing, was published in 2024.
Poetry
Poetry may well be 'a pheasant disappearing in the brush', as Wallace Stevens quipped, but on this course we will carefully and cunningly follow that pheasant into the underwood. In this series of workshops, we will go in deep and examine new and old examples of poetry, to figure out how it can be made. You can write poetry in so many ways these days, and you will experiment with traditional and avant-garde methods of writing poems, learning not only how to write different kinds of metrical lines but also accomplished free verse, among other things. Ben Jonson knew that 'a good poet's made, as well as born', and on this course you will be made into one through continual practice, innovative imitation, and workshop discussion.
Tutor: Dr Edward Clarke teaches English literature and art history at Oxford University. He is the author of two books of criticism, The Later Affluence of W. B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens and The Vagabond Spirit of Poetry, and he has edited a selection of poems by Henry Vaughan and George Herbert, Divine Themes and Celestial Praise. His collection of poems, A Book of Psalms, was published 2020. ‘Clarke’s Psalter’, the documentary he presented about writing these poems, was broadcast on BBC Radio 4. His latest collection of poems is called Cherubims. A selection of his poems, The Voice inside Our Home, was recently published.
Scriptwriting
This course is based on the study and creation of scripts for stage, screen and radio and on helping aspiring dramatists to develop a practice to engage with a golden age of script writing. Convincing characters in coherent plots, with a keen awareness of genre, is the basis of all good fiction. We shall explore such core elements, culminating in the submission of a short script. In the third week, students can workshop a script begun outside the course. Dramaturgy will be strictly focused to help writers to develop individual writing for performance projects, using processes that are ‘industry standard’.
Tutor: Shaun McCarthy has had over a dozen stage plays professionally produced and a range of radio dramas broadcast. His adaptations include J.M. Synge’s The Aran Islands (BBC R4 Classic Serial), a stage version of A Christmas Carol that was a critique of David Cameron’s ‘big society’ and had a happy, unexpected ending; and a re-set of Strindberg’s Miss Julie to Oxford 1963. He teaches a range of creative writing courses for the Department, runs Hooligan Theatre Productions to develop his new plays and co-runs the writing events and residential writers’ retreats company ‘Stage and Page' in the UK and Italy.
The Short Story
This course encourages you to become a braver, more vital writer by experimenting with the short story form. As close to poetry as it is to prose, the short story is ideal for testing uncommon characters and situations, innovative structures and syntax. Unlock voices and creative techniques that will transform your writing practise. In the final week we will focus on intensive self-editing and how to transform a saggy, weak story into a powerful, shapely narrative, through close examination of language, rhythm, energy and pace. Perfecting short fiction is a great way to build your track record through publication in literary journals and entry to awards judged by agents and publishers.
Tutor: Susannah Rickards' collection of short fiction, Hot Kitchen Snow, drawn from experiences of growing up in North East England and working in East Africa, won the international Scott Prize in for best debut fiction collection in 2010, and is published by Salt. Her writing regularly appears in journals and anthologies and has been broadcast on BBC radio. She read English at Oxford University and now lives in Surrey, where she writes and mentors new and established authors.
