Creative writing embraces a wide range of genres, from fiction to non-fiction, including the novel, the short story, poetry, drama and screen-writing, and various forms of writing such as crime, travel and biographies. Creative writing includes all writing that is original, innovative and imaginative. It can be what you do for your own pleasure or as your career.

The course topic in 2017: Finding Your Voice

“Don’t be a ‘writer.’ Be writing.” —William Faulkner. There are lots of people who want to be
writers, but how many want to push themselves to ‘be writing’? To explore all that words can do, to
themselves and the world? Award-winning poet Fiona Sampson and novelist Peter Salmon will help
you develop your unique, individual voice, and look at ways to shape your vision into art. Whatever
your level of experience, whatever your chosen form, the tutors will push you to find a way of
expression that will challenge both you and the reader. Lazy writers need not apply

The course tutors are Fiona Sampson and Peter Salmon.
Fiona Sampson MBE is a poet and writer published in thirty-seven languages. She has received the
Newdigate Prize, the Cholmondeley Award, a Hawthornden Fellowship, Kathleen Blundell and
Oppenheimer-John Downes Awards from Society of Authors, Writer’s Awards from Arts Council
England and Arts Council Wales, various Poetry Book Society commendations, and the Zlaten
Prsten (Macedonia), the Slovo Podgrmica (Bosnia), the Charles Angoff Award (US). She is Fellow
of the Royal Society of Literature and Professor of Poetry at Roehampton University, London. New
books include The Catch (Penguin 2016), an exploration of Limestone Country (2017), and a
forthcoming biography of Mary Shelley (2018).
Peter Salmon is an Australian writer living in the UK. His first novel, The Coffee Story (Sceptre,
2011), was a New Statesman Book of the Year. He has written frequently for Australian TV and
radio and for broadsheets including the Guardian and the Sydney Review of Books. The Blue
News, his satirical column about books and publishing, was subsequently collected and published
by Melbourne University Press as Uncorrected Proof (2005). Formerly Centre Director of the John
Osborne/The Hurst Arvon Centre (2006-2012), he also teaches creative writing, most recently at
Pembroke College, Cambridge and Liverpool John Moores University.