Creative Writing PhD

University of Birmingham

Work with our team of award-winning authors to develop your creative practice and its critique. Creative Writing at Birmingham is part of the Department of Film and Creative Writing, and is closely aligned to the Departments of English Literature and English Language and Applied Linguistics, allowing you to benefit from our breadth of expertise.

This practice-based PhD will support you in the development of a long-form piece of creative writing, or a sequence of related works. You will also identify critical concerns and interests related to your creative practice. The final submission is divided between the creative piece and a related critical document.

Your PhD submission will usually entail:

• For prose: a creative document (50 – 80%) of either long-form prose/novel, or a collection of short-form prose/stories supported by a critical paper (20–50%) of a similar length to a critical literary PhD submission (around 80,000 to 100,000 words). A novel, for example, should be somewhere between 60,000 to 80,000 words. The critical paper can be between 20,000 to 40,000 words. This would be discussed with your supervisor throughout your study.
• For poetry: a creative document of collected poems or a single work with a developed critical thesis (around 50,000 words)
• For scriptwriting (for film and live performance): a single project or a collection of multiple shorts should be of comparable length and commitment as the prose element, with a critical element between 20-50% of the overall submission.

Other creative formats (for example a script for a graphic novel) will follow the poetry or prose model, with a 20–50% split for the critical element.

The creative document will be an original work of significant, publishable quality which demonstrates an understanding of craft, genre, and form. The critical document will present a structured and developed argument that demonstrates an awareness of context, and discuss, where relevant, critical and creative processes.