English Literature and Creative Writing
English literature and creative writing is a combination that recognises what every serious writer knows: that being a better reader makes you a better writer, and being a practising writer makes you a more perceptive reader. Literature study develops the analytical vocabulary to understand how texts work, how meaning is made through form, structure, and language, and how writers have responded to and resisted the traditions they inherit. Creative writing develops your own capacity to make those choices deliberately, to draft and revise with intention, and to find your own voice within and against the conventions of prose fiction, poetry, and other forms.
At Aberystwyth University, this three-year full-time programme offers a genuinely bilingual university environment in one of the most distinctive settings of any UK university, a town on the west coast of Wales with a strong cultural identity and a long tradition in Welsh literature and the arts. The English literature and creative writing degree draws on a department that takes both the critical and creative dimensions of the subject seriously, with staff who are active researchers and published writers. You will read across the history of English literature, engage with contemporary debates in literary criticism, and develop your writing through workshops, feedback, and your own sustained practice.
The creative writing component covers a range of forms, typically including prose fiction, poetry, and often creative non-fiction or scriptwriting, and the workshop model of teaching, in which you share and receive critical feedback on your work with peers and tutors, is central to how the subject is learned. Aberystwyth's location and atmosphere give the degree a particular quality, with the sea, the landscape, and the cultural life of west Wales providing a distinctive creative context.
Graduates move into writing, publishing, journalism, teaching, arts administration, editing, content creation, broadcasting, and postgraduate programmes in creative writing or literary studies.