Creative Writing

Key programme benefits to future students

Our Creative Writing students enjoy teaching visits and readings from outstanding contemporary authors. Visitors to UL Creative Writing have included Colum McCann, Anne Enright, Louise O’Neill, Claire Keegan, Mary O’Malley, Sara Baume, Liz Nugent, Marian Keyes, Sinead Gleeson, Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Ford and Laureate for Irish Fiction Sebastian Barry.



Our Chair of Creative Writing is Prof Joseph O’Connor (author of nine novels including, My Father’s House, Ghost Light, The Thrill of it All, the million-selling Star of the Sea, and Shadowplay, winner of the Novel of the Year Award at the 2019 Irish Book Awards, shortlisted for the UK’s prestigious Costa Novel Award, 2020). Our outstanding teachers include twice Booker Prize-longlisted Donal Ryan, (author of The Spinning Heart, From a Low and Quiet Sea and Strange Flowers), widely acclaimed Rob Doyle (Here Are the Young Men and This is the Ritual), and Irish Book Award nominee Prof Sarah Moore Fitzgerald (The Apple Tart of Hope and A Strange Kind of Brave), internationally published Young Adult author and lecturer on self-motivation for writers.

Creative Writing



Autumn Modules

• Creative Writing 1

• Creative Writers in the Community 1: Planning and Preparation

• Project Development for Creative Writers



Optional Modules

Gender and Sexuality in Irish Writing |

Literature | Film | and Human Rights | Situating

Irish Gothic | Literary Modernism



Spring Modules

• Principles of Storytelling and Writerly Reading

• Individual Creative Writing Project / Dissertation Rehearsal

• Creative Writing 2

• 3-hour Weekly Workshop

• Creative Writers in the Community 2: Engaging and Implementing



Optional Modules

Politics and American Literature | Postcolonial Theory and Literature | Issues in Modern and Contemporary Poetry | Feminist Literary Theory | Irish Americas in Literature and Culture



Summer Modules

• Creative Writing Dissertation

Applicants should hold a bachelor’s degree (NFQ Level 8,) with at least a second-class honours, grade 2 (2:2) in a relevant discipline.



You must submit a 3,000-word sample of creative writing. This can be one single piece or several pieces.



Other Entry Considerations:



We encourage you to apply even if you don’t meet the standard entry requirements, as long as you can show that you have the knowledge, skills, and experience needed for the programme.



At UL, we value all kinds of learning and support different ways to qualify through our Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) policy.

1 year full-time, 2 years part-time, on campus.

Autumn

Graduate careers

Recent graduates of our Creative Writing MA have been published nationally and internationally and have won or been short-listed for major literary prizes, including the prestigious Hennessy New Writer of the Year Award, the RTE Francis McManus Award, the Listowel Writers’ Week Bryan MacMahon Short Story Award, the Arts Council Next Generation Award and the Irish Writers’ Centre Novel Fair Award.