Overview
The PhD in Creative Writing at King’s is a practice-led course, incorporating taught elements and aspects of professional development. It is designed to cater for talented, committed writers who are looking to complete a book-length creative work for publication and sustain a long-term career in writing.
Key Benefits
Our unique programme offers students:
- a varied, structured framework for the development of their creative work, with regular feedback from experienced author-lecturers in the department through supervision and workshops
- purposeful engagement with professionals from the publishing and performance industries throughout the course, building potential routes to publication
- valuable teaching experience in creative writing at HE-level through our Graduate Teaching Assistantship scheme
- practical experience in public engagement, through curating and chairing public literary events at King’s
- a community of fellow writers and collaborative projects
English Department
Department of English - Research recognised (REF 2021) with 90 per cent overall rating for either ‘world leading’ (4*) or ‘internationally excellent’ (3*) research and 100 per cent at 4* and 3* for research environment.
We have over 100 doctoral students from all over the world working on a wide range of projects. Together with our community of postdoctoral fellows, our early career researchers both organise and participate in our thriving seminar and conference culture.
The English department is home to award-winning novelists, poets, essayists, biographers, non-fiction authors, and literary critics, who supervise creative projects at doctoral level within their specialisms.
Works by our staff have won or been shortlisted for a number of literary accolades, including: the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize, the Man Booker Prize, the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, the Costa First Novel Award, the Costa Poetry Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, the Commonwealth Book Prize, the Biographers’ Club / Slightly Foxed First Biography Prize, the U.S. National Book Critics Circle Award, the CWA Gold Dagger Award, the European Union Prize for Literature, the RSL Encore Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Letters, le Prix du Roman Fnac, le Prix du Roman Etranger, and the Kiriyama Prize. Many of the creative writing staff are Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature.
Their most recent publications are:
Daughters of the Labyrinth (Corsair, 2021) – fiction
Beethoven Variations: Poems on a Life (Chatto & Windus, 2020) – poetry
Emerald (Chatto & Windus, 2018) – poetry
The Young Accomplice (Penguin Viking, 2022) – fiction
A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better (Scribner, 2018) – fiction
The Invention of Angela Carter (Chatto & Windus, 2016) – creative non-fiction
Loop of Jade (Chatto & Windus, 2015) – poetry
The Group (John Murray Press, 2020) – fiction
Free Woman: Life, Liberation and Doris Lessing (Bloomsbury, 2018) – creative non-fiction
Homing: On Pigeons, Dwellings, and Why We Return (John Murray Press, 2019) – creative non-fiction
Mayflies (Faber & Faber, 2020) – fiction
The Secret Life: Three True Stories (Faber & Faber, 2017) – creative non-fiction
*may vary according to research leave and availability.
King's Alumni
The list of King’s alumni not only features many acclaimed contemporary authors—Michael Morpurgo, Alain de Botton, Hanif Kureishi, Marina Lewycka, Susan Hill, Lawrence Norfolk, Ross Raisin, Alexander Masters, Anita Brookner, and Helen Cresswell—it also includes major figures in literature, such as Maureen Duffy, Arthur C Clarke, Thomas Hardy, Christopher Isherwood, BS Johnson, John Keats, W. Somerset Maugham, and Virginia Woolf.