Creative Writing

Entry requirements

The creative and critical elements will entail considered independent research and development. For this reason, we can only consider applications from applicants who have successfully completed an MA in Creative Writing, or candidates who can demonstrate composite professional experience (which includes publishing). This should be clearly demonstrated in your application. For the PhD, you must demonstrate how the research project relates to your current creative practice.

Please note: check the staff profiles prior to application to make sure that your proposal is within an area that we can support. We will be unable to support a research project which falls too far outside of our own field of research and teaching.

For the application we require:

• a detailed outline describing the planned creative project
• an outline of the potential critical enquiry and how it relates to the creative project (this can be less detailed than the description of the creative project)
• a statement about your reasons for considering a research degree
• examples of creative work
• a short resume or CV
• two references from people who are familiar with both your creative and critical abilities

The application will be reviewed by the department in several stages. If there is an interested and available supervisor we will ask you form an interview, which can happen online.

Months of entry

January, September

Course content

Work with our team of award-winning authors to develop your creative practice and its critique. Creative Writing at Birmingham is part of the Department of Film and Creative writing, and is closely aligned to the Departments of English Literature and English Language and Applied Linguistics, allowing you to benefit from our breadth of expertise.

This practice-based PhD will support you in the development of a long-form piece of creative writing, or a sequence of related works. You will also identify critical concerns and interests related to your creative practice. The final submission is divided between the creative piece and a related critical document.

Your PhD submission will usually entail:

For prose: a creative document (50 – 80%) of either long-form prose/novel, or a collection of short-form prose/stories supported by a critical paper (20–50%) of a similar length to a critical literary PhD submission (around 80,000 to 100,000 words). A novel, for example, should be somewhere between 60,000 to 80,000 words. The critical paper can be between 20,000 to 40,000 words. This would be discussed with your supervisor throughout your study.

For poetry: a creative document of collected poems or a single work with a developed critical thesis (20,000-50,000 words)

For scriptwriting (for film and live performance): a single project or a collection of multiple shorts should be of comparable length and commitment as the prose element, with a critical element between 20-50% of the overall submission.

Other creative formats (for example a script for a graphic novel) will follow the poetry or prose model, with a 20–50% split for the critical element.

The creative document will be an original work of significant, publishable quality which demonstrates an understanding of craft, genre, and form. The critical document will present a structured and developed argument that demonstrates an awareness of context, and discuss, where relevant, critical and creative processes.

You can study our Creative Writing PhD full-time or part-time, on campus or by distance learning.