English Literature with Creative Writing (Placement Year)

Why Lancaster?

• Explore literature from the medieval period to the present day, while also developing your own writing.

• Shape your critical voice skills as you discuss and debate with our widely-published authors, critics and scholars

• Enhance your creative work through text-based writing experiments and workshops focusing on your own writing

• Develop your portfolio of writing by getting involved with our four student-run literary journals: Cake, Lux, Flash, and Errant

• Be inspired by our rich programme of literary events on campus, online, and in the city’s historic Castle Quarter

• Study close to the beautiful Lake District, home of Wordsworth and the Romantic poets, and inspiration for many writers since.

Lancaster was one of the very first universities to teach creative writing. Today we continue to lead the way in bringing together critical and creative writing through pioneering experimental forms of literary criticism.

Great names, forgotten names
This degree programme allows you to spend three quarters of your time exploring literature and one quarter developing your own creative writing. You’ll have the chance to study great names of literature, and to discover names and voices that have been forgotten or overlooked over time.

Along the way, you can engage with a host of different literary forms, ranging from myth to flash-fiction, tragedy to epigram, and slave narrative to graphic novel.

Rich academic experience
Your lectures will be supplemented by small-group seminars and workshops. You’ll be invited to discuss your work one-to-one with your tutor.

You will be able to select from a host of modules and, in your final-year Dissertation, free to explore a literary project of your own devising, with support via regular one-to-one tutorials.

Support, events and study trips
Many of our special literary events, such as talks from visiting scholars and authors, take place in the University Suite at Lancaster’s spectacular medieval Castle.

The Castle has often been the setting for the summer Shakespeare production our students organise. The Wordsworth Museum at Grasmere is usually the venue for our study retreat day, where students use the impressive archives.

The Department’s May Gathering is a fun social event and is usually held at Lancaster’s ancient Priory.
The University also offers short, overseas study trips outside of term time – a visit to New York has been particularly popular in previous years.