On Applications and Employability

By Jonathan Taylor

As part of the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester, we run a major module on "employability" called Applications: Publishing, Teaching & Other Stories. This core module considers the vocational and professional aspects of Creative Writing, looking beyond the university workshop to the world outside. It's a crucial part of the Master's degree. I see Creative Writing as a hybrid subject, which brings together practice-based, research-based and vocational forms of knowledge. 

The module deals with three key strands in relation to employability: 

• the dissemination of Creative Writing in public and professional spheres (e.g. the publication and performance of Creative Writing);
• other diverse ways in which Creative Writers subsist in the world (e.g. through portfolio careers, made up of teaching, journalism, editing, writing for professional briefs, etc.);
• the myriad related fields to which the transferable skills that Creative Writing develops can be applied.

These three strands might also be seen as concentric circles, moving from the immediate vocational context of the dissemination of Creative Writing, to professional contexts directly related to Creative Writing, to the much wider circle of professions which draw on the writing skills students have developed. We look at major and independent publishing, the role of literary agents, literary magazines and reviewing, performance contexts and techniques, writing for briefs, and so on. The module includes workshops, seminars, talks as well as guest speakers from the professional writing world. 

I've been teaching the professional side of Creative Writing for twenty-five years now, and I've seen students go on to work in a myriad of different fields. In a literate economy, the value of writing well, reading critically, storytelling skills, imaginative use of language, communication skills can hardly be overestimated. Jobs and roles I've seen students go into after studying Creative Writing have included (among many more): novelist, short-story writer, poet, screenwriter, playwright, radio writer, speech writer, creative non-fiction writer, travel writer, memoirist, children's author, PhD student, academic, teacher (in all sorts of different contexts, and at all levels), tutor, publisher, performance poet, stand-up comedian, events manager, arts manager, festival manager, arts programme coordinator, literature development officer, public relations manager, human resources manager, advertiser, politician, journalist, literary magazine editor, commercial magazine editor, game designer, radio producer, radio presenter, voice-over artist, TV presenter, producer, web content creator, publicist, marketer, film producer,  accountant, literary agent, editor, copy editor, commissioning editor, copywriter, web designer, solicitor (through a conversion course), doctor (through a conversion course), civil servant, librarian, archivist, financial manager, administrator, counsellor, bookseller, actor, reviewer, arts organisation director ... and so on and so forth. 

Recently, though, I've been thinking a lot about "employability," and about how we should perhaps understand the term much more broadly. Given the state of the world, I've been thinking about the other invaluable (yet more intangible) roles Creative Writing graduates often take up, whether as writers or in their lives as a whole. Ideally, employability shouldn't just be a matter of "training" for particular roles in the capitalist world; it might also be about changing those roles, dreaming up new ones, maybe even dreaming of changing the world itself (however slightly). After all, Creative Writing, by definition, encourages you to re-imagine the world, or to imagine new worlds. In that regard, I think employability in Creative Writing is also about roles that have never seemed more vital in our society - such as dreamer, idealist, utopianist, magical thinker, empath, mentor, radical, creative, artist, activist, communitarian, critical thinker, social critic, optimist, pessimist, optimistic-pessimist, pessimistic-optimist, visionary, prophet, poet, storyteller, "unacknowledged legislator of the world" (as Shelley puts it). 

Spring News 2026

Our last News post was back in December. You can read it here. Lots has been happening since then in the Centre for New Writing at the University of Leicester, so here is an update on student and staff news. Thank you so much to everyone who helps make this such a vibrant community of writers. It really is a very special thing to be part of.

Firstly, congratulations to all of the MA and PhD Creative Writing students who graduated in January 2026! PhD graduate Joe Bedford was invited to speak at the ceremony. You can see his speech here. If you are interested in the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester, you can read more about it here. Applications are open for Autumn entry 2026. 

From the 18th to 21st March, the University of Leicester held the 2026 Literary Leicester Festival, which, as usual, included lots of wonderful speakers, panels and events. As part of the festival, we hosted our annual Creative Writing Student Showcase. Undergraduate, postgraduate and graduate creative writers who performed at the event included Laura Besley, Nina Walker, Anupriya Sisodia, Lisa Williams, Olivia Peachey, Brandon Clune, Sophie Stockdale, Beth Gaylard, Mithila Dutta Roy, Mellissa Flowerdew-Clarke and Laurie Cusack. Thanks to everyone who made it such a lovely occasion - a brilliant celebration of everything students do. 

Our blog Everybody's Reviewing has now had over one a half million readers, and Creative Writing at Leicester has had over 800,000 readers. Thanks to everyone - our students, authors, reviewers, editors, interviewers and readers - involved. Back in January, lots of our students, graduates and staff contributed to our annual Favourite Reads of the Year article on Everybody's Reviewing. You can read it here. 

Congratulations to MA Creative Writing graduate Jess Bacon, whose book I'm Just a Girl will be published by Piatkus in June. Read more here.

In March, PhD Creative Writing graduate Joe Bedford hosted a panel for the European Network for Short Fiction Research, which also included Jonathan Taylor as one of the invited speakers. 

Congratulations to Laura Besley, PhD Creative Writing student, whose story "The Only Shade of Time is Gray" won third prize in the Henshaw Press Short Story Prize. Her story "These Days You're Kinda Okay" has been nominated for Best Small Fictions 2025 by Literary Namjooning Magazine. You can read it here. Her story "Seventeen Years from Now" has been published in Gooseberry Pie Lit Magazine here. She has written a review for Everybody's Reviewing here. 

Tracey Foster, MA Creative Writing graduate, has written a review of Muse by Ruth Millington for Everybody's Reviewing here. 

Congratulations to Cathy Galvin, PhD Creative Writing student, whose debut poetry collection, Ethnology: A Love Song for Connemara, has been published by Bloodaxe. She has been giving readings across the UK and Ireland, including at the Emerald Centre in Leicester. You can read more about Ethnology here. 

Congratulations to Beth Gaylard, who has now completed her PhD in Creative Writing in March.

Congratulations to PhD graduate Tim Hannigan, whose new book The Pathless Land: Finding a Way Across Ireland will be published by Apollo in August this year. Read more here. 

Congratulations to PhD Creative Writing student Kathy Hoyle who won second prize in the Hammond House Literary Awards Short Story category for her story, "Leporidae." Her story "Humbug Shark" has been nominated for Best Short Fictions 2025 by Does It Have Pockets?. You can read it here. Her story "Auld Gallowa" has been longlisted for the Bedford Short Story Competition.  

Congratulations to Mathew Lopez-Bland, who completed his PhD in Creative Writing in March. 

Iain Minney, MA Creative Writing student, has written a review for Everybody's Reviewing of The Dark Fields by Alan Glynn. You can read it here. 

Kimaya Tushar Patil, MA Creative Writing graduate, has written a review of The Cruel Prince by Holly Black for Everybody's Reviewing here. 

Karen Powell-Curtis, PhD Creative Writing graduate, has written a review of Have they marked you with arrows? by Jayne Stanton for Everybody's Reviewing here. 

Congratulations to Cathi Rae, PhD Creative Writing graduate, whose new poetry collection, Writing Elegies for Dead Men I Didn't Meet, has recently been published by Coalville CAN Publishing. You can read more about the collection here. You can read a review of the book on Everybody's Reviewing here. She has also written three articles on "Poetry for Everyone" for Writing Magazine. You can see more details here. 

Mithila Dutta Roy has reviewed Kit de Waal's Supporting Cast for Everybody's Reviewing here. 

Anupriya Sisodia, MA Creative Writing student, has been undertaking work experience as editor for Everybody's Reviewing. She has written a review for the site here. 

Jonathan Taylor's second novel Melissa, published in 2015, has been named as one of Stoke-on-Trent's "100 Books," a list of one hundred books from the Potteries to celebrate a hundred years of the city. He has written reviews for The Morning Star, which you can read here, here and here. His story "Cassie and the Green Knight," commissioned by the West Midlands Readers' Network, is in the anthology 5 Stories. With Karen Stevens, he has also been co-editing a book of essays, Creative Writing and the Critical Commentary, which will be published by Bloomsbury in June 2026. 

Congratulations to PhD Creative Writing graduate Paul Taylor-McCartney whose historical fantasy epic, the 5-book Broken Pentacle series, is going to be published by Blue Poppy Publishing. The second of the series, Guardians of the Pentacle, will be published in November this year. You can read about the first book here. His book, Cornwall Uncharted: Mapping Cornwall's Queer History of Concealment, Culture and Creativity, will be published by the History Press in June this year. Paul has also written reviews of The Language of Now by Anne Caldwell and The Subtle Art of Short Fiction, ed. Isabelle Kenyon, both for Everybody's Reviewing here and here. 

Harry Whitehead will be reading and speaking at Oundle Lit Fest on the evening of Friday 17th April, and Wirksworth Book Festival on the afternoon of Saturday 25th April. He'll be talking about his novel White Road, which you can read more about here. 

Congratulations to Lisa Williams, MA Creative Writing graduate, whose novella provisionally entitled The Longest Day will be published by Road Song Books later this year. Lisa has also written a review for Everybody's Reviewing which you can read here. 

Tom Sykes, "The Years of Travelling Anxiously"

 

Tom Sykes is the author of seven books. His reportage and travel writing has appeared in New Statesman, The Independent, the Scotsman, New Internationalist and numerous other titles all over the world. He is Associate Professor in Creative Writing and Global Journalism at the University of Portsmouth and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

About The Years of Travelling Anxiously, by Tom Sykes
Welcome to the topsy-turvy world of the anxious traveller, where panic strikes in the most serene situations, where each time you're convinced that the symptoms are in fact physical and your lungs or heart will stop working, and the only relief is a paramedic telling you that you won't die despite being stuck with them in an ambulance in a smoky Global Southern gridlock.

Over the last twenty years, writer and academic Tom Sykes has been lucky enough to travel all over the world. But his trips have often been marred - if not ruined - by anxiety. Part travelogue, part wellbeing memoir, The Years of Travelling Anxiously recounts jittery visits to Nigeria to get married and undergo IVF treatment, stressful encounters with bigots and bureaucrats in France, the Philippines and the USA, and what can be learned about mental health on the road from a baby with an inspiringly calm attitude to travel.

The Years of Travelling Anxiously tries to solve a lifelong conundrum about the causes and consequences of panic and distress, and in so doing help other anxious travellers, or indeed anyone who gets anxious about anything, wherever they go.

You can read more about The Years of Travelling Anxiously on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the book. 

From The Years of Travelling Anxiously 
I thought I’d learned. Grown. Don’t we all? We cling to these stories of progress in both society and our personal lives. From birth we’re fed maxims about life getting easier as it goes. Face your fear, conquer your fear. "That which does not kill us, makes us stronger," wrote Nietzsche. I thought I’d spent enough time in the Philippines to have squished all fear of it. After living here plus eight trips over the last thirteen years, I’ve toughed out the heat, the traffic jams, the pollution, two minor car crashes. I’ve been to the places where drug-users were executed by vigilantes. I’ve interviewed an activist who was hounded at home by a soldier who warned them to stop dissing the regime – or die. I stayed cool on all those occasions. 

I thought I’d devised strategies. I’d learned to pass the auto-stalemates by looking out the window and noting graffiti, adverts or the arbitrary poetry of urban breakdown – storm-dislodged hyacinths mantling the Pasig River, kids racing each other through a concrete pipe abandoned diagonally across a Cubao backstreet. If there was nothing to see, I’d read a book or pen my own. Writers shouldn’t be short of material in a mesmerising city like Manila. 

So why now am I in a taxi on Kalayaan Avenue, Quezon City, shaking like machine gun recoil, battling for my breath, launching water down my torrid throat? Why has the soothing inner voice of curiosity – how interesting is this, how fascinating is that – declined into the gravelly tones of paranoia? Will I make my interview on time? Are my questions facile and white and privileged? Do I smell? Why is the hand-fan strapped to the head rest in front of me only multiplying the amount of warm air rather than cooling me down? Will I have enough change for the driver at drop-off? Does the driver know where he’s going? Am I going to die? A Philippine taxi with rear seatbelts is as common as a good film starring Gerard Butler. 

These are rookie worries – or should be. Worrying about these worries only adds to the worry. It’s a self-perpetuating process.  

The MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester: What You Can Expect

Our acclaimed MA in Creative Writing is open to applications here. We think it's important to be up-front about what support you and your writing will receive if you embark on the course. So here (below) we've set out as clearly as possible what you can expect from the course, whether you take it full-time or part-time. We believe passionately that Creative Writing can be taught - that it's almost entirely a learnt skill - and that all students who finish this course are, almost inevitably, better writers as a result of the intense study provided by a Master's degree. 

Please do let us know if you have any questions about the MA, by emailing jt265@le.ac.uk. 

What you can expect on the MA in Creative Writing at Leicester:

• Four taught 30-credit semester-long modules: EN 7040 Research Methods in Creative Writing, EN 7041 Styles, EN 7042 Applications, EN 7043 Substances 
• An individually-supervised Dissertation in Creative Writing, from May to September (EN 7044)
• One two-hour workshop per week (usually ten weeks) per 30-credit semester-long taught module (so you have one two-hour workshop per week if you are part-time, two two-hour workshops per week if you are full-time)
• In-depth introductions to two particular forms (e.g. poetry and prose fiction)
• In-depth introductions to two particular themes (these vary year on year, but have included subjects such as Space, Memory, Time, Climate Change, Place, Creative Reading, etc.)
• Workshops on research skills (which might include subjects like using oral histories, archival research, interdisciplinary research, etc.)
• Workshops on aspects of the professional writing world (such as publishing, performance, teaching, etc.)
• Thorough feedback on summative assignments (i.e. formal assessments)
• A supervisor for your Dissertation over Summer, who provides individual supervision and feedback on draft sections
• A personal tutor who oversees your progress, and whom you meet at least twice a semester for an individual tutorial
• Office hours or pre-arranged appointments, in which you can drop in to see tutors (either in person or electronically)
• Detailed handouts, resources and learning materials shared on Blackboard (the virtual learning environment)
• Online electronic reading lists for every module
• Continuous email support

And, on top of these formal aspects of the course, you can also normally expect additional support and resources, such as:

• On-going feedback on formative work-in-progress from peers and staff
• Guest lectures and masterclasses by authors, publishers, editors, agents from outside the university (obviously depending on budget and availability)
• Attendance at other events hosted by the Centre for New Writing, the School of Arts, Media and Communication and the annual Literary Leicester Festival 
• Voluntary attendance at any of the undergraduate lectures in Creative Writing
• Access to online resources, including the Creative Writing at Leicester University Facebook group (on which we post opportunities, jobs, events, news, articles), Everybody’s Reviewing, and the Creative Writing at Leicester blog
• Opportunities to gain experience of participating in a major literary festival (i.e. Literary Leicester)
• Performance opportunities (e.g. at Literary Leicester)
• Postgraduate Creative Writing research seminars
• Connections with professional writing and publishing networks
• Electronic forums on which you can share work with other students
• Advice on publishing, teaching, careers, etc. 
• Participation in a vibrant community of Creative Writing students, graduates, local and national authors.

All about the MA in Creative Writing Dissertation at the University of Leicester

Towards the end of the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester, students concentrate on an individual extended writing project, the Dissertation in Creative Writing. The Dissertation is the students' opportunity to concentrate on a pet major project (e.g. a collection of stories, a poetry collection, a script, an extended extract from a novel, etc.), and develop it with the help of an individual supervisor. This is the students' chance to write what they always wanted to!

The Dissertation usually runs from May to mid-September, after the four taught MA modules have been completed. The Dissertation consists of three stages:

1. In May, students attend the annual Creative Writing Dissertation Day, where they get to share ideas with each other and tutors. Following this, student submit a short proposal about their intended project.

2. Students are then allotted an individual supervisor, who meets with them regularly over Summer, providing feedback and advice on the work in progress. 

3. Students submit their Creative Writing Dissertation in mid-September. 

Over the last few years, we've featured a number of our MA Creative Writing students who have written about their Dissertation experience, so to give a flavour of the (huge) range of different creative possibilities in this respect, we've collected some of these articles (below). There's lots of great writing and research advice here, and some fantastic projects. Do take a look!

If you're interested in either the part-time or full-time MA course in Creative Writing, and would like more information, please do email Jonathan Taylor on jt265@le.ac.uk. You can apply here.

Some Articles by Students about the MA Creative Writing Dissertation on Creative Writing at Leicester. 

Anna O'Sullivan, My MA Creative Dissertation

Mandy Jarvis, Moving on Up: My Creative Writing Dissertation

Tracey Foster, Deep Diving the YA Market: My Creative Writing Dissertation

Kate Durban, The Creative Writing Dissertation

Danni Devenney, Girls Who Play Sports 

Thilsana Gias, Researching and Writing a Historical Dissertation

Rosie Anderson, Managing a Creative Writing Dissertation

Millie Henson, The Call of the Wild in Children's Literature

Tionee Joseph, Mastering the Dissertation

Hilda Hoy (金邦琳), "Mother Tongue"

Hilda Hoy (金邦琳) is a Taiwanese Canadian writer, editor, and translator based in Berlin. In addition to working as a reporter for the Toronto Star and the Prague Post, she has published narrative non-fiction in Roads & Kingdoms, Slate, BBC Travel, and Narratively, as well as a travel guidebook titled The HUNT: Berlin. 

She is currently working on an essay collection exploring the entanglement of identity and language in individuals with backgrounds of migration or displacement. In December 2024, this project saw Hilda serve as writer in residence at the Taiwan Literature Base in Taipei. The diaspora experience and examinations of identity are central themes in her writing.

About Mother Tongue, by Hilda Hoy
In Mother Tongue, Hilda Hoy explores the manifold capacities of language: to shape one’s sense of self, to bring together, to hold apart.

Raised in Taiwan by her Taiwanese mother and Canadian father, bilingual from the beginning, Hoy explores her experience of growing up with otherness, and traces how English became her dominant tongue. After many years living in Canada and Europe, her Chinese-speaking self packed into a box and sealed shut, the repercussions of her loss of Mandarin are thrown into sharp focus when her mother is diagnosed with dementia, and begins losing the ability to speak.

A tender exploration of grief and reconnection, of belonging and self, Mother Tongue is the story of a journey to locate one’s voice between hybrid places.

You can read more about Mother Tongue on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a short excerpt from the book. 

From Mother Tongue
When my father was at work and my mother had errands to run, we sometimes went into the city by taxi. These journeys followed a pattern. Crooning ballads on the radio, the smell of cigarette smoke and perm solution. The crinkle-haired driver examining us in the rearview mirror, brow scrunched in puzzlement. Zhèxiē háizǐ shì shuí de? Whose children are these?

Wǒ de, my mother would reply. They’re mine.

Crooning ballad on the radio. Cigarette smoke. Exclamations of disbelief. How could a woman like her have such white children? They’re mine, my mother would repeat, her jaw tensing ever so slightly. Or: You’re right, I found them on the street. The driver would laugh, but she did not. I understood every word but said nothing, watching the world go by through glass. It seemed pointless to speak when my face spoke for me, telling the only home I’d ever known that I did not belong.

Books by Students on Creative Writing at Leicester

Over the last few years, BA, MA and PhD students and graduates in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester have had amazing success publishing their books and chapbooks - including novels, short story collections, flash collections, novellas-in-flash, poetry collections, memoirs and works of creative non-fiction. We've featured lots of these on this blog, so we thought it might be a good time to collect some of them together, as a way of celebrating these authors' successes - congratulations to all once again!

You can find out more about our BA in English with Creative Writing here, our BA in Journalism with Creative Writing here, our acclaimed MA in Creative Writing here, and our PhD in Creative Writing here. 

Here (below) you can find links to just some of the books we've featured on this blog by Leicester University BA, MA and PhD students and graduates in Creative Writing over the last few years.

Joe Bedford, A Bad Decade for Good People (novel)

Laura Besley, The Almost Mothers (flash fiction collection)

Laura Besley, Un(Natural) Elements (micro-fiction collection)

Constantine, Alien Boy (children's novel for reluctant readers)

Constantine, And things begin to change ... and other stories (short story collection)

Constantine, Jötunheim (children's novel)

Constantine, Tales of the Charnwood (short story collection)

Constantine, Tiya and the Minotaur (children's novel)

Constantine, The Cats of Charnwood Forest (children's novel)

Laurie Cusack, The Mad Road (short story collection)

Kassie Duke, Word Bath (poetry collection)

Cathy Galvin, Ethnology: A Love Song for Connemara (poetry collection)

Cathy Galvin, Walking the Coventry Ring Road with Lady Godiva (poetry collection)

Tim Hannigan, The Granite Kingdom: A Cornish Journey (travel writing)

Talia Hibbert, Get a Life, Chloe Brown (novel)

Kathy Hoyle, Chasing the Dragon (novella-in-flash)

Sabyn Javeri (ed.), Ways of Being: Creative Non-Fiction by Pakistani Women (edited anthology)

Kevan Manwaring, Writing Ecofiction (textbook)

Cathi Rae, Just This Side of Seaworthy and Other Poems and Rock, Paper, Scissors and Other Poems (poetry collections)

Cathi Rae, Your Cleaner Hates You and Other Poems (poetry collection)

Cathi Rae, Writing Elegies for Dead Men I Didn't Meet (poetry collection)

Anita Sivakumaran, Cold Sun (novel)

Hannah Stevens, In Their Absence (short story collection) 

Paul Taylor-McCartney, Sisters of the Pentacle (YA novel)

Rory Waterman, Come Here to this Gate (poetry collection)

Rory Waterman, Sweet Nothings (poetry collection)

David Wharton, Finer Things (novel)

Cathy Galvin, "Ethnology: A Love Song for Connemara"

Congratulations to Cathy Galvin, University of Leicester PhD Creative Writing student, whose poetry collection Ethnology has just been published by Bloodaxe Books!

Cathy Galvin's debut poetry collection, Ethnology: A Love Song for Connemara, is published by Bloodaxe Books in the UK and Ireland. She has published three previous pamphlets of poetry, Black & Blue (2014), Rough Translation (2016) and Walking the Coventry Ring Road With Lady Godiva (2019). She is widely published as a poet and short story writer and is the recipient of a Hawthornden Fellowship, a Heinrich Böll residency and an Arts Council England DYCP award. As a journalist she has worked as a senior editor for Newsweek and the Sunday Times. She founded the Sunday Times Short Story Award and the short story organisation, the Word Factory. She is the editor of Red, an anthology of new writing published by Waterstones. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Leicester and lives near Bodmin Moor in Cornwall. 

About Ethnology: A Love Song for Connemara, by Cathy Galvin
Ethnology draws on the mystical cry for the dead of Cathy Galvin's Irish-speaking ancestors. Within an epic narrative she reclaims place, people and language and creates a dialogue with the poets, folklorists and ethnologists who have written about the West of Ireland for their own agenda. Loss, and loss of a mother tongue, are carefully explored. 

You can read more about Ethnology on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From Ethnology

Walls

There’s no anvil, brooch, harrow-pin.

The currach’s broken, walls stand without a roof.

All that’s left: a bureau containing bills,

cards, scarves, a Will.

You’re not in view but I can hear a breath

– the well-made dress and phrase.

My made things broke long ago.

They had little purchase on this world.

The creed, letters I do not read.

Solid seem the things that slip away.

Leaving us bone.

We stake a claim, lay foundations,

build and watch it fall.

Within, the comforts that ease survival.

We cut back wilderness, tame, contain

sycamore, birch, bramble, willow, grass.

All return.

Our walls come down, consolations go.

We do not come back. Take away it all

and what is left is who we are.

Our homes are built to go. 

Coventry Carol

You did not sing in Irish or in English.

Never told me what the English did to your people,

were clear you did not want an Irish husband,

someone who might sing sweetly and leave his wife behind,

become a father like yours who did not feed his own children.

When the Irish began bombing Birmingham,

and a shopkeeper refused to serve me in my Catholic

school uniform, your silence filled my mouth.

Creative Writing in Space

As of September, 2026, the University of Leicester is introducing a new MA programme in Space and Society. Grounded in the arts, humanities, and social sciences, this unique interdisciplinary MA will critically examine how humans have imagined, experienced, and interacted with space across time. It will challenge students to think creatively and analytically about the cultural, political, and ethical dimensions of the new space age. The course will be taught under the aegis of the pioneering Leverhulme Centre for Humanity and Space - a ground-breaking research hub where space exploration meets the arts and humanities. 

The Centre for New Writing at the University of Leicester is involved in both the Leverhulme Centre for Humanity and Space, and the new MA in Space and Society. As part of the new programme, we will be offering an optional module called Creative Writing in Space. This exciting interdisciplinary module will be shared between the MA in Creative Writing and the MA in Space and Society, and will be available to students on both programmes. It will be taught by Dr Jonathan Taylor from Creative Writing and Dr Cheryl Hurkett from Genetic and Genome Biology. You can read more about this new module below. Email jt265@le.ac.uk if you want further information!

ABOUT EN 7923 CREATIVE WRITING IN SPACE

This module sends your Creative Writing into space, on a quest to find new worlds, new concepts, new metaphors – to boldly go where no Creative Writing module has gone before. We believe that the universe is simultaneously a scientific phenomenon and a beautiful work of art – a poem, or a (very long) story. We want you to explore cosmological concepts, the tales told by physicists, the metaphors of popular science, and to produce writing that takes on these concepts, tales, metaphors, that extrapolates futures, pasts and alien worlds from them, or that explodes them, pushing their metaphorical implications towards some kind of absurd singularity. 

On the module, you’ll write speculative fiction, scientific poetry, creative non-fiction, or maybe even just realist fiction that draws on the imagery of space in order to explore human psychology – transferring outer space to inner space, as it were. Ultimately, this is how Creative Writing can talk back to Space Studies: if, on the one hand, the module is about how Creative Writing can draw on scientific concepts, on the other, it is also about what science can learn from the very human stories told by poets, novelists, memoirists. 

No previous experience of Creative Writing is necessary to take this module. The module is shared between students on the MA in Space and Society and students on the MA in Creative Writing programmes at the University of Leicester. 

Cathi Rae, "Writing Elegies for Dead Men I Didn't Meet"

Congratulations to UoL MA and PhD graduate, Cathi Rae, whose new poetry collection has been just been published!

Cathi Rae is a poet, spoken word artist, teacher of creative writing and anti-ageist activist. She has performed throughout the UK and has been described as a "spoken word icon" by Joelle Taylor. Cathi has an MA in Creative Writing and a practice led / creative PhD - both awarded at the University of Leicester. Her new collection is Writing Elegies for Dead Men I Didn't Meet (Coalville CAN Community Publishing, 2026). 

About Writing Elegies for Dead Men I Didn't Meet, by Cathi Rae
Nick Everett writes: "This collection explores the painful but important subject of male suicide in a series of eloquent and sensitive poems, each informed by a true story. Drawing only on information publicly available on social media, these are poems of respectful distance as well as of imaginative sympathy; and they bear moving testimony not only to the distinctive of each commemorated individual but also to the tragically powerful social forces that lead men to suffer in silence rather than share their feelings."  

25% of proceeds from the book will be donated to @andysmanclub - a UK based grassroots charity supporting men's mental health. You can read more about Cathi's work on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From Writing Elegies for Dead Men I Didn't Meet

Tiger Feet

There’s a photo of you   a snapshot    snap-shot

in a kitchen full of the clutter of life with children

a jumble of laundry 

leaning into the door of the washing machine

an endless cycle of

clean and worn and dirty

and is this how you came to feel

worn out    and    dirty

but       there’s this picture

taken for no special reason

except that someone said    smile

and so you did

can of beer 

comfortable in your fist     familiar

I can tell

and you should be wearing Riggers     

or Docks   or even battered baseball boots

smeared with plaster stains and paint

work wear     work-worn    

instead     you’re wearing tiger slippers

you’re wearing tiger feet 

daily everyday wear

seen better days

your suicide almost unnoticed

no social media Greek chorus grief

seven people noticed that you were gone

worn out    and dirty

endless cycle     ceased

and I wonder 

what happened to your tiger feet.

Club 18 to 35

Planning a road trip with a mate    so off his head on pills 

he’s already seeing double before you’ve even left the car park

tyres with tread so thin that only belief 

keeps traction on the road

and a brake light that flickers

On

Off

On 

Off

don’t think about it

pump up the volume

bang out a rhythm on your steering wheel

this is still safer than being a boy aged 18 to 35

or on an off-the-books 

and under the radar building site

you stand on scaffolding

railing at the skies

sans hard hat of course

because you’re hard enough

“Come on God - do you want some?”

this is still safer than being a boy aged 18 to 35

  

be a squaddie

in an army    any army

in a desert    far from home

where the red dust road goes on forever

dropped into a landscape you can’t read 

not fluent in foreign

scarcely fluent in your mother tongue 

this is still safer than being a boy aged 18 to 35

be a superhero 

on a media friendly tower

acrid smell of sweat and fear

homemade banner     Rights for absent fathers

the S scrunched up too small

looked so much easier when you planned it on the web

this is still safer than being a boy aged 18 to 35

 

blamed for every act of violence

held responsible    even when you weren’t

finally formulated this efficient use 

of guns and ropes and pills

rubber tubing snaking from exhausts to driver’s seat

this tidying up of all loose ends

 

finally in touch with your feelings

too late

 

when a room’s on fire 

sometimes a leap into nothing

feels the safest thing.

Andrew Button, "Shatner in Space: Beyond the Cosmic Pizza"

 

Born in Nottingham in 1965, Andrew Button grew up there before leaving for university and currently lives in Leicestershire. He works as a librarian for Warwickshire County Council. Andrew has had many poems placed in magazines and anthologies and a pamphlet, Dry Days in Wet Towns, was published in 2016. To date, he has had three collections published by erbacce press: The Melted Cheese on the Cosmic Pizza (2017), Music for Empty Car Parks (2019) and Shatner in Space: Beyond the Cosmic Pizza (2023).

As a performing poet, he has headlined and performed at various open mics and in libraries (and online) mainly across the Midlands, including Coventry’s Fire & Dust, Coventry Central Library, Nottingham’s Crossed Words, Derby’s Wordwise, Chesterfield’s Spire Writes, Leicester’s now-defunct Shindig, Birmingham’s Poetry Bites, Lichfield’s Poetry Alight, Leamington’s Script Stuff and PureGoodandRight and several Warwickshire libraries, to name but a few. In April 2025, he started his own open mic, Can of Words, in Coalville.

Andrew's poetic influences range from Ian MacMillan, Simon Armitage, Phillip Larkin, Lavinia Greenlaw, Roger McGough to Ray Bradbury, the lyrics of 10cc and Mary Chapin Carpenter, music in general and Yorkshire tea (lots of it)! His poetry is observational, anecdotal and ironic. He likens himself to a poetic eavesdropper and is a keen observer of eccentric and obsessive behaviour. 

About Shatner in Space: Beyond the Cosmic Pizza, by Andrew Button
Many of the poems in Andrew’s latest collection were written in Lockdown and shortly afterwards. As a result, there are a raft of poems that reflect the state of physical and mental confinement that we faced, but at the same time, they are looking for the light of better times. This is juxtaposed with poems about space (including the title piece), the irony of which was never more evident than during the COVID crisis. 

At other moments, the book is interspersed with quirky poetical observations on everything from pensioners riding in pelotons, the President of the UK Roundabout Appreciation Society, to toilet paper engineers and the eccentric habits of the Swiss on Sundays.

Above all, this collection reveals Andrew’s certifiable optimism and roving poetic eye that takes in a smorgasbord of subjects and themes.

You can read more about Shatner in Space: Beyond the Cosmic Pizza on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From Shatner in Space: Beyond the Cosmic Pizza

Space

Floating in our tiny orbits,
satellites of the sofa,
the world has shrunk.
If it wasn’t for the gravity
of the situation,
we’d be free to roam,
untethered, beyond these rooms.

Housebound, the supermarket mission
is one small step of any kind
and our ground control
is Marcus Rashford and Sir Captain Tom.

Distance from loved ones
feels like galaxies
as parts of families
have become detached
from their docking stations.

Like astronauts
and the Kinks
on Waterloo Sunset,
every day, we look at the world
from our windows,
real and televisual
and fasten ourselves in
to the sentiments of Mr Blue Sky.

Keep telling ourselves,
as Tim Peake must have done
when falling to earth,
re-entry won’t be long.

Static in the Wires

We surge through the years
from babbling babies
to vibrant young adults.
From confident thirty somethings
to anchored middle age
and venerable seniority.
Industrious as ants,
we accumulate memories
and experiences
storing them on the grid
of our minds
ready to be discharged
when required. 
If we’re lucky,
in life we’ll rub off
on our children, relatives
and friends
and in death,
remain an invisible force
of energy
like static in the wires.

Anne Caldwell, "The Language of Now"

 

Anne Caldwell is a poet, editor and arts collaborator based in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire. She lectures in Creative Writing for the Open University. She has been described as one of "fifty-one world class prose poets" in the international anthology, Dreaming Awake: Prose Poetry from Australia, the USA and United Kingdom (Madhat Press, 2022). She has gained a national and international reputation for this genre. She has four previous collections of poetry, including Neither Here nor There (SurVision), which won a James Tait Prize. 2024. Anne’s work is featured in The Book of Bogs (Little Toller Press, 2025). She had an Arts Council Award in 2024 to write about peatlands in West Yorkshire and Finland with filmmaker Lewis Landini and Dance Artist Inari Hulkkonnen. Her website is here. 

About The Language of Now, by Anne Caldwell
The Language of Now is a prose poetry collection firmly rooted in a northern sense of place and eco-poetics, as well as an exploration of the turbulence of illness and climate change. Prose poetry is brilliant at holding contradictions and juxtapositions: qualities that are exploited in a search for an intimate relationship with the natural world. Caldwell explores childhood memories, the fragility of landscapes both rural and urban, and the impact of the pandemic, where our connection to each other was fragmented and stretched. The prose poems combine the real and the fairytale, memoir and myth, where humans transform into birds and language is lost and found. She sees poems as small acts of resistance. As the title poem suggests, "The language of now is short and full of gaps." Here is darkness, but also a sense of playfulness in the writing, as the poems interweave the down-to-earth cadences of prose and the musical intensity of poetry. 

You can read more about The Language of Now on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample prose poems from the book. 

From The Language of Now

Wasp’s Nest 

I wanted to be a goat when I was young. Agile and cloven-hooved. My days were spent poking cowpats with a stick, sending clouds of bluebottles into the hot sky as the hay meadows chirped with crickets and grasshoppers. One evening there was an empty wasp's nest in Nana Clarke’s attic. Paper whorls, like a handmade balloon. I went and sat with it, amongst trunks of musty linen and love letters, the regrets and hopes of her thrifty, wartime generation. I'd always thought of Nana as a good witch, full of herbal remedies and canny wisdom. Neighbours had her down as a complete and utter crackpot. What would she have made of Brexit, Long Covid, Climate Catastrophe? Would these words have been barbs in her throat, as she pursed her lips and searched for marshmallow and lemon verbena? Perhaps the wasps were still swarming out there, looking for a place to shelter. I listen for the thrumming of wings, the ragged edges of our lives. 

Widdop Gate, High Summer

Mowing weather and a blue tractor races across Shakleton, fields striped with drying grass. The moor is rectangles of heather burnt or shorn, year after year. I’m trying to forge a path through the bog, King Common Rough below me and the sparkle of Graining Water. It’s a hot day up on the tops. Meadow browns flit between sedge and rushes, bracken carpets the valley sides. The wind sings, no turbines, this land is egg-shell delicate.

Goldfinch break cover, crickets chirp, lambs bleat for mothers. I think of my boy gone to the Far East looking for adventure, seeking out the last scraps of Sumatran rainforest, searching for Orangutan before they’re all gone.

Here, the bog’s pleasures are quieter. If we healed its wounds, peat would soothe our over-heating earth like honey. Moss feathers boulders, bilberry nestles in crevices. I discover lichen circles blooming on stone — a map of the whole world in miniature.

Annabelle Slator, "Risky Business"

Annabelle Slator grew up writing stories in the depths of the British countryside. After achieving a degree in Creative Writing, she spent most of her twenties working with brands and start-ups in London and New York. Nowadays, if she isn’t spending time writing, you can almost always find her obsessing over niche internet drama, practising her fencing parry or mooching around vintage fairs and flea markets with her husband and two dachshunds, Gruffalo and Gryffin. The Launch Date is Annabelle’s debut novel, inspired by her time working in the wild world of dating apps. Risky Business is her second novel, inspired by her experiences working in the tech and start-up industry.

 

About Risky Business, by Annabelle Slator
Tech founder Jess Cole, desperate to keep her start-up afloat, is forced to pose as her brother’s assistant during a tech competition, hoping a male-led company will be taken more seriously, only to find her secret identity "Violet" compromised when she has a hot one-night stand with the head of the competition’s assistant.

You can read more about Risky Business on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a short excerpt from the novel. 

From Risky Business

"You made it." His low timbre coats the seething anxiety flowing through my veins.

I turn my chair on the swivel, laying my phone face down on the bar and cocking my head to the side, "Disappointed?"

Oliver stifles a smile, chin lowering to meet my eyeline. "Far from it, I was hoping you'd show." His fingers pinch the sides of a sweating glass.

I balance on an elbow, glancing at the drink. "So you can throw a beer on me and finish the job?"

"How about I just buy you one instead?" He gestures to the empty seat beside me, and I nod, rolling my eyes and crossing my legs. He doesn't hold himself with the same buzzing energy most in this room do, like they are desperate to impress their bosses and one another. He has a commanding presence, a mixture of laid-back and authoritative that I can't quite get a handle on.

He settles into the chair and leans his forearms onto the bar, his shoulder muscles tensing under the crisp white shirt. I feel a quiet thrill in his company, like an echo of adrenaline.

His chin shifts to me, the tea lights in red jars on the bar casting his cheekbones in a devilish glow. "What made you decide to come?"

I shrug, glancing awkwardly from him to the shelf of bottles with brightly coloured Italian labels. "I was having a mental breakdown in the area so thought it would be rude not to."

He huffs a laugh, hazel eyes twinkling. "Bad day?" The words roll off his tongue so smoothly that I imagine he was a cigarette-lighting bartender in another life.

I contemplate lying, but something about him is making me want to tell him the truth, to drop the pretences. I lean my elbow on the bar, resting my chin in my palm. "Bad year."

He whistles, almost impressed. "We better make it a double then." He gestures to the bartender with two fingers.

I shake my head, the background noise returning to the room with a pop as I come out of the minor trance. "You don't need to buy me a drink."

He shoots me a fake-appalled look. "Listen, I'm just trying my best to charm you over from the actively disliking me camp to a more neutral zone. I owe you at least one." He holds up a shiny black credit card. "Besides, this is my boss's card." He hits me with another winning smile.

"Oh, well, in that case, I'll have a Negroni." I sit back, relaxing into the chair. "How come your boss lets you run amok with his credit card?"

He taps the short edge of the plastic on the wooden bar. "Because I'm the only one who knows how to get his coffee order right, and knowledge is power."

"The keys to the caffeinated castle," I add with a nod.

He points at me with the shiny card. "Exactly."

"If only you could deliver them in one piece," I add, brow arched.

"Well, then I'd be running the whole company, and nobody wants that."