Creative Writing MPhil

University of Bristol

MPhil: a standalone, one-year (full-time) research degree. Students will undertake their own research or creative project, concluding in the submission of a 25,000 word dissertation/project (normally 17,000-18,000 words of creative writing and 7,000-8,000 of critical writing). Students may have the option to audit units from our taught master's programmes if they are relevant to their research.

PhD: a research project undertaken across three years (full-time, plus a writing up period), culminating in an 80,000 word thesis/project (normally 50,000 words of creative work – often an extract from a longer project – and 30,000 words of a critical investigation). As well as having the option to audit taught units, there may be the potential for PhD students to teach units themselves from their second year of study onwards.

A postgraduate research qualification in Creative Writing consists of an original body of work - normally a novel, or a collection of poetry/short stories - with an accompanying critical element. The critical element will place the creative work in an informed and theorised analytical context.

The total assessed word count will be 25,000 words for our MPhil and 80,000 words for the PhD (or equivalent for poetry). The proportion of the creative to the critical work will be agreed by the supervisory team, but in total will usually consist of around 65-70 per cent of creative text and 30-35 per cent of critical text.

All postgraduate research students are supervised by two academics, one of whom will normally be a creative writing academic and the other from English literature or a related discipline relevant to the creative and critical work. As with the traditional research degrees, the final submission will be expected to make ‘a substantial and original contribution to knowledge’. For Creative Writing, this means a body of work that contributes in individual, significant and demonstrable ways to current discourses in literature.

The relation to such discourses will be articulated in the creative work and conceptualised and explored in the critical element; both are intended to address the same research questions, generating dynamic interplay between creative and critical practice.