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. 

Writing for Laughs

By Georgia Duplooy 

In this, the last semester of my final year, I took a new module called 'Writing for Laughs.' On this module, we explored comedy in its various genres - including short fiction, poetry, stand-up and sit-coms. We looked at, discussed and applied a range of theories about the nature of comedy and laughter, such as the 'Incongruity Theory,' 'Superiority Theory' and 'Relief Theory.' This latter suggests that we sometimes laugh when a period of mental strain has ended - for example, a type of hysterical joy akin to the feeling of submitting an essay you agonised over. Each week would then also focus on a comedic genre or era of comedy, and we had many opportunities to try our hand at these genres and share our ideas with our peers. 

Despite our class being small, it was certainly an enthusiastic one, with debates ranging from  "can we laugh at stereotypes?" to "what makes Brooklyn Nine-Nine so popular?" In short, for the majority of the group, myself included, this was their favourite class of the term as we tackled social issues, watched funny clips on Youtube and delved into philosophical debates all connected to the topic of laughter. 

Ironically we learnt - or perhaps it confirmed our previous suspicions - that laughter has as much to do with comedy as it does tragedy, as seen in Charlie Chaplin’s parodying of Hitler in The Great Dictator. Whether you can laugh at these types of comical caricatures or not, there was a comedian or genre that everyone enjoyed - and my personal favourite was comic poetry. To give you a taste of the scope of comedy and nonsensical humour that you can have fun with in class, here is a poem I wrote for the oral presentation:


To my arch enemy, the freezer

You wail and buzz, 
And man, what’s the fuss?
You’re an inanimate object that feels no pain. 
Yet you screech in my ear, whenever I’m near, 
and my patience is starting to wane.
Morning, noon and night – it’s like you do it out of spite, 
and I can hear you through the kitchen door. 
So with a throbbing head 
and my good mood long since dead, 
I unplug you and suffer no more.  


About the author
Georgia Duplooy is a final-year English BA student and a Creative Writing enthusiast.