Centre For Poetry And Poetics & Creative Writing - University Of Sheffield

Welcome to the Creative Writing Page of the University of Sheffield. Watch out for this space for poetry and prose readings, festivals, creative writing competitions and any other news connected with anything we do and like. . . .

We offer Creative Writing in our Undergraduate Courses in Level 1, Level 2 and Level 3 in both poetry and prose.

The MA in Creative Writing grew out of our MA in English Literature and has now established itself as a programme in its own right. We are the only programme in the UK that offers students both training in creative writing and an MA in English Literature.

The course is primarily taught by the University of Sheffield´s Professor of Poetry, Simon Armitage, Dr Agnes Lehoczky (poetry) and Dr Alice Gavin (fiction).
We see our students following in the footsteps of graduates such as Ann Sansom, Chris Jones, Cliff Ashcroft, Eleanor Rees (all of whom have published two or more collections), Claire Lockwood (published in Poetry Review), Andrew Bailey (winner of the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize).

To see how active the field of Creative Writing is within the School of English, please browse the student magazine, Route 57, and the prestigious poetry journal, Blackbox Manifold, edited by Adam Piette and Alex Houen, which has published poems by Simon Armitage, Medbh McGuckian, Paul Muldoon, Charles Bernstein, Tom Leonard, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Michael Schmidt, Caroline Bergvall, Sean O'Brien, and many others.

Course Structure: Poetry

If you choose to follow the poetry curriculum you will take these two thirty-credit modules as core:

Creative Writing: Poetry 1 (Autumn semester)
Creative Writing: Poetry 2 (Spring semester)

You will also choose a further 60 credits from the modules available on the general English Literature MA programme, which includes courses on modern and contemporary poetry. The course ends with a 60-credit dissertation (80% creative; 20% critical-reflective) written over the summer.


Course Structure: Prose

If you choose to follow the fiction curriculum you will take these two thirty-credit modules as core:

Creative Writing: Fiction 1 (Autumn semester)
Creative Writing: Fiction 2 (Spring semester)

You will also choose a further 60 credits from the modules available on the general English Literature MA programme, which includes courses on modern and contemporary fiction. The course ends with a 60-credit dissertation (80% creative; 20% critical-reflective) written over the summer.


Teaching and Learning

The poetry and fiction modules workshops will cover genre-specific skills and commission new work from students. Students will have the opportunity to close read one another's work, as well as receiving feedback from the tutor.

The workshops are accompanied by a series of other workshops, readings and events organized by the creative writing team involving guest writers and workshop leaders, involvement in festivals (Off the Shelf, the Sheffield Poetry Festival, etc. ). Students are encouraged to publish their work and to set up student-led, peer-feedback editorial sessions.

The creative writing components of the course are taught in the evening from 5: 30 until 8: 00.

The MA is also available part-time, in which case it is taught over two years.
Our Staff

Professor of Poetry, Simon Armitage will be teaching Poetry 1. He has published ten volumes of poetry including Selected Poems, 2001 (Faber & Faber). His most recent collections are Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus the Corduroy Kid and Seeing Stars, both published by Faber & Faber in the UK and Knopf in the United States. He has received numerous awards for his poetry including the Sunday Times Author of the Year, one of the first Forward Prizes and a Lannan Award. He writes for radio, television and film, and is the author of four stage plays and two novels.



Prose poet Dr Agnes Lehoczky teaches Poetry 2. She is a poet, scholar and translator. The most recent of her collections of poems is Budapest to Babel (2008) and Rememberer (2011) and Carillonneur (Shearsman, 2014). In 2011 she was awarded the Jane Martin National Poetry Prize. Her collection of essays on the poetry of Agnes Nemes Nagy Poetry, the Geometry of the Living Substance was published in 2011.

In 2012 Agnes was selected to represent Hungary at the 2012 Cultural Olympiads, for further information on this fantastic achievement please visit the Poetry Parnassus and Cultural Olympiad page.

Dr Alice Gavin is a writer, musician, and scholar. Midland / A Novel Out of Time was published by Penned in the Margins in 2014 and has since been shortlisted for the 2015 Gordon Burn Prize. The publisher’s page for the novel is here. Yes Manzoni is a companion EP to Midland — additional tracks associated with the project can be heard here — and she also produces performance and sound projects such as 0121 Stimmtausch. Titled “Never Was, ” my current project involves a parafictional account of a boyband that never existed.

Professor Adam Piette's most recent project was the monograph The Literary Cold War, 1945 to Vietnam (Edinburgh University Press, 2009) which looked at writers including Graham Greene, Storm Jameson, Saul Bellow, Allen Ginsberg, Vladimir Nabokov, John Dos Passos, Josephine Herbst, Grace Paley, William Burroughs, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. He is also general editor of the student creative writing magazine, Route 57, and co-edit the poetry journal, Blackbox Manifold.

The staff teaching on the course will be backed up by members of the School of English with experience of creative writing.

We offer Creative Writing in our Undergraduate Courses in Level 1, Level 2 and Level 3.