Creative Writing and Politics BA (Hons) (with Foundation Year)

CREATIVE WRITING

Liverpool is a city of poets and storytellers so the perfect location to study creative writing. Merseyside has a distinctive literary culture and at Liverpool Hope you are taught by writers, poets and academics with strong connections to the local writing community and international recognition for their work.

Creative Writing at Liverpool Hope will give you the chance to experience the joys of crafting the written word. The degree focuses on developing you as a writer of poetry and prose (fiction and creative nonfiction), across the broad field of literature (poems, short stories, novels, reflective and critical essays). Professional writing - reviews, blogs and articles for different kinds of media, including how to operate in today’s marketplaces - is also studied. Our focus on creativity and employability means you will be able to produce engaging, innovative and marketable texts.

By studying Creative Writing, you will be empowered with an enhanced command of your craft, increased confidence in expressing your thoughts and emotions, an understanding of the values that inform your writing practice, and the technical skillset to deliver your work to various audiences. Your writing will be enhanced by studying under leading published writers and academics, and you will develop a range of workplace skills to prepare for fulfilling careers.

The degree will often challenge you and ask you to reach beyond your own experience and interests into those of contemporary and historical communities. Using these as creative stimuli, you will be required to reflect upon social contexts, power, and how truth and justice can be communicated or miscommunicated through creative writing. By the end of the degree, you should have a wide appreciation of forms, genres and applications. Included in the degree are field trips which provide material for writing exercises as well as widening your student experience.

Lecturers are all practising writers, poets and academics and will include you in their working lives as writers whether this is book launches, public readings and festivals or writing workshops in the community. You will have the opportunity to read your work at open mics on campus and in the city, present at city cultural events or publish in the two literary magazines run by Liverpool Hope students and postgraduates.

POLITICS

Politics affects all of us. It is central to human life and human affairs. It is fundamental to how we organise and govern ourselves and to how we resolve conflicts. The decisions we make as political communities, who makes them and how, have consequences for how we live, from questions of war and peace, the distribution of wealth, our rights, freedoms, responsibilities, our access to education, transport and health care.

In this rapidly changing world, new challenges are constantly arising – from climate change to new technologies, from identity politics to Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic – and the study of politics needs to respond. At Liverpool Hope, therefore, we seek to engage with politics and political issues in the real world as they evolve and change over time. In doing so, we actively encourage free and open debate and discussion amongst our students, encouraging a stronger awareness and appreciation of different points of view.

On this programme of study, you will explore key ideas, institutions and politics in an international, national and local context. You will be taught by staff who are experts in their fields, who will teach you to engage with political research and develop the capacity to be an independent, critically-minded scholar. The course also aims to equip you with transferable skills to take into the world of work.

Liverpool Hope can also offer work placement opportunities. In Politics we’ve also organised a Practitioners in Politics series of events, in conjunction with our Careers Office, where individuals including MPs, the Mayor of Liverpool and the Merseyside Commissioner for Crime and Policing have come to advise students on pathways into political careers and the skills needed to get there.