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MA Creative Writing

Face-to-face events

Meet your peers, and exchange valuable ideas.

MA Creative Writing students walk together at a face-to-face event

At the University of Hull, we take great pride in the sense of community students feel within our online spaces. We also work to strengthen these bonds by hosting up to two face-to-face events per year across Europe. 

These events are a fantastic chance to exchange ideas with fellow students and tutors alike, and develop a special rapport with them. With guest speakers from the creative writing community, a diverse range of activities, and topical discussions, you can enrich your learning outside of what your course modules cover. 

What will you take from our MA Creative Writing events and workshops? There’s only one way to find out, so we hope to see you there! 

Why attend a Creative Writing face-to-face event?

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Exchange ideas and draw inspiration from like-minded people 

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Unleash your full creative potential as a writer

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Network and explore potential future job opportunities
Adaora Ogunniyi, MA Creative Writing student

“I’ve enjoyed the ambience, meeting my tutors and the opportunity to settle down and do more writing.”

Adaora Ogunniyi, MA Creative Writing student

Explore our latest event

Want to see what you can look forward to in our face-to-face events? Take a look at one of our recent events below. Please note that each event has a different agenda, so upcoming events won’t have identical formats to previous ones. 

MA Creative Writing retreat

Hull Online MA students from across the globe gathered at Moulton Grange, Northampton for a hybrid creative writing retreat. With a schedule full of fun, immersive live workshop sessions, this event was a perfect chance for aspiring writers to connect with their cohort, their tutors, and their Course Leader, Dr Chris Westoby. Attendees were given a variety of creative prompts to work with, showcased their excerpts, and refined their ongoing writing projects together.

Students were also able to take part virtually, so everyone had the opportunity to hone their writing skills and share constructive, nurturing feedback with their peers. We’re proud of the sense of community we foster for online students, and there’s no doubt that attendees left the event feeling more inspired and connected than ever before.

Previous event: To Hull and Highwater!

To Hull and Highwater! took place over two days in the city of Hull. While most attendees traveled from around the UK, we also had students joining us from the US, South Africa, Nigeria, and Kuwait. 

On the first day, the group was within Hull’s city centre, exploring the streets together before landing in an independent publishing house; on the second day, they set up camp within the beautiful University of Hull campus.  

Activities across the two days were designed to enrich students’ writing knowledge, engaging in discussions on writing topics that sit outside of the taught modules of the programme and immerse themselves in the Hull Online community of writers. 

Event workshops and talks

Wrecking Ball Press - an insight Grey

The UK’s independent publishing sector is vibrant, diverse and, despite high levels of uncertainty, thriving. Students got insights into how independent press publishers like Wrecking Ball discover and represent unique voices, stories and poetry. They also gained insider knowledge on how to get into indie publishing and make an impactful first impression. 

Presenter: Dave Windass – freelance editor for Wrecking Ball Press

Writing Speculative Fiction Grey

The ultimate crossover genre, speculative fiction overlaps with sci-fi, fantasy, horror, gothic, fractured fairy tales, re-written myth, alternate history, magic realism, dystopian, slipstream, ghost stories, literary fiction, and all the hybrids in between! In this talk/workshop, students explored the writing and publishing of speculative fiction from the tiniest type ('artifice' flash fiction) to the 'one impossible thing' short story, to the high concept novel pitch, dreaming up stories as they went. 

Presenter: Kate Horsley - Online Tutor (The Writer’s Craft, Writing the Short Story, Writing the Novel), Supervisor (The Writer’s Portfolio). 

'The wild garden of childhood' (Pablo Neruda) - Mining your past to feed your fiction Grey

Flannery O'Connor famously said 'Anyone who survives [a southern] childhood has enough material to last a lifetime' - and it's probably true of all our childhoods. In this session tutor Barbara Henderson used some childhood-related prompts and exercises to spark new writing.  

Presenter: Barbara Henderson, Module Leader (Writing the Short Story, Writing the Novel), Online Tutor (The Writer’s Craft, Writing the Short Story, Writing the Novel, Writing from Life), and Supervisor (The Writer’s Portfolio). 

Join our community

Transform your passion for reading into the ability to produce prose worthy of public recognition.

EXPLORE THE MA IN CREATIVE WRITING

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