MA - Writing

I studied BA English Literature & Creative Writing at Warwick, then carried on to do the MA in Writing. I now work as an editor for a publishing house in Farnham but I am an aspiring writer with short stories published in a number of literary anthologies.

The four years I spent at Warwick were among the most formative and inspiring years anyone could ask for. I don't want to sound too much like I've just stepped out of the Dead Poet's Society, but it's genuinely difficult to overstate how good the English department at Warwick is: with engaging lectures and seminars and stimulating course material and reading lists. I based my MA dissertation on my grandfather's memoirs, which detail his experiences as a medical officer in the Second World War, and explored the relationship between memoir writing, human memory and the concept of 'truth' and fiction. Studying an MA gives you the freedom to work really hard at something you find incredibly interesting. This isn't to romanticise the experience, because it involves a lot of painstaking effort and thinking really hard about something for a prolonged period of time: days and weeks and months of going to bed and waking up with a kind of slow fire urgency and the feeling of having to get this impossible number of thoughts down on paper because they sometimes seem so ephemeral and fleeting. And it’s hard to look back on those words and realise they're not quite right, or not articulated clearly or just a sign you've drunk too much coffee. It’s an education you don't necessarily get the chance to experience in the day-in-day-out repetition of a society that does little more than tell us to go out and get things for ourselves and gratify ourselves and just 'go' all the time, without giving us the time to think hard and listen carefully and read and learn.

The course structures and the facilities available to MA students are excellent, but that's something you can read in online brochures. And it wasn't because of facilities or a course structure that I decided to continue with my MA at Warwick. I knew I was making the right choice in studying the MA at Warwick because I'd seen how good the system was from my undergrad years. Thinking about it, I'm not sure there was any other choice that would have made sense.