Professional Writing (MA)

Overview

The MA Professional Writing is a flourishing postgraduate programme that attracts a wide range of talented writers from around the world. Alongside British students, our postgraduates (who must demonstrate a high level of proficiency in written English) come from the United States, Canada, Thailand, Hong Kong, India, Russia, Italy, Holland, Greece and Turkey to take an MA that is a pioneer in the field of Professional Writing. Rather than focusing on just fiction or non-fiction, students are encouraged (indeed are required) to develop their writing skills in a wide range of genres, from Creative Writing to Feature Journalism, Technical Writing to Scriptwriting.

Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities

Applying and entry

PLEASE NOTE There is no official closing date for this course, but you are advised to apply as early as possible as we will only consider your application if there are places available on the course.

Tel: 020 7133 4202
Email: admissions@londonmet.ac.uk

The minimum entry requirement will normally be a lower second class Honours degree, which should preferably include modules or courses in either creative writing or journalism.

Applicants will also be considered who have a relevant professional qualification and/or extensive relevant professional experience.

Applicants must submit with their application two contrasting recent samples of their writing, published or unpublished, fiction or non-fiction, of between 500 and 1000 words. These can be an extract from a longer work, or a stand-alone piece.

Course contents

The course consists of six essential modules and a core dissertation or extended writing project of around 14,000 words.

The core modules include:

• Writing and Editing
• Writing London
• Research Methods

Optional modules include:

• Technical Writing
• Advanced Use of English
• Feature Journalism
• Scriptwriting
• Creative Writing
• Writing and Censorship

Read more details about the modules

Our teaching staff include:

• published poets (one the author of four published collections)
• an award-winning film and television scriptwriter whose TV series is currently being piloted by Home Box Office in the USA
• an award-winning journalist

Among our guest lecturers are:

• Martin Toseland, literary agent, a publishing director of Harper Collins and senior commissioning editor at Penguin
• David Farbey, technical writing specialist (manuals, brochures, reports, marketing copy) and recruitment consultant
• Katharine Whitehorn, distinguished ‘Observer’ columnist for over 30 years, agony aunt for ‘Saga’ magazine
• Delia Jarrett-Macauley, author of the Orwell Prize-winning novel about child soldiers in Sierra Leone, ‘Moses, Citizen and Me'
• Katy Holland, deputy editor of ‘Pregnancy and Birth’ magazine and travel columnist for ‘The Independent on Sunday’

Assessment

A range of coursework including: original articles; stories or chapters of a novel; features for newspapers, magazines, online or journals; life-writing and memoir; scripts for film/television/radio/theatre; creative non-fiction; reflective and analytical commentaries; reports; research dissertation or extended piece of original writing (which may be substantially creative work).

Careers

The course aims to equip you with a sufficient range of advanced skills to allow you to write in genres such as journalism, short stories and fiction, life writing and memoir, writing for performance, creative non-fiction. This is very much in line with the increasing emphasis on freelance work within the creative and cultural industries in London, nationally and internationally. The course also develops your editing skills, enabling you not only to edit your own work more effectively, but also to identify the strengths and areas for improvement in other people's writing - a valuable skill since so many writers also work as editors.

Our postgraduates are completing novels, working in publishing or have landed jobs in broadcasting. Among the others, one:

• was a winner in the Third Decibel Penguin Prize Anthology, one of 14 winning entries published in 'The Map of Me' (Penguin, 2008)
• has been appointed Editor-in-Chief of a new website for young web users being launched by Microsoft Netherlands
• set up London Poetry Systems, an online interactive project of poems and sonic collages, and a poetry blog archive
• is now deputy editor of a pan-European Russian language newspaper and regular contributor to a new Moscow-based magazine
• has written a comic opera about the popular press, parts of which have already been performed at the Riverside Studios in London
• is writer and member of the editorial team at a new bimonthly glossy on art, fashion, music and popular culture
• produces corporate, web and marketing copy for universities, charities and health sector organisations
• has set up the all-women choir 'Gaggle', widely reviewed on radio and in the press