Creative and Critical Writing

The PhD Programme in Creative and Critical Writing offered at Cardiff University is for students and writers wishing to complete a substantial creative work of marketable quality. Our own MA in Creative Writing provides an ideal basis for students wishing to undertake a PhD.

The PhD in  Creative and Critical Writing Creative and Critical Writing at Cardiff University Cardiff University caters to individuals keen to join a thriving community of writers from novelists and memoirists to poets and scriptwriters all of whom share the common purpose of immersing themselves in the composition of a substantial piece of creative research.

The programme includes a compulsory critical element in which students relate the creative work they produce to its wider critical and cultural contexts and evaluate the conceptual and theoretical contribution the work represents.

Programme aims

The PhD programme is designed to enable students to put together an original piece of creative work a novel, collection of poems or short stories, a play, film script, or work of creative non-fiction together with a reflective critical commentary.

The programme offers knowledge and expertise to take you on to a role in Higher Education, or employment requiring high-level skills in research or advanced subject knowledge.

The programme recruits a diverse range of Home/EU and International students who want to engage in a research environment characterised by world-leading research expertise in all aspects of creative writing.

Distinctive features

• The PhD programme offers a monthly seminar series specific to Creative Writing research students.
• The School makes funding available each year for PGR students who wish to attend conferences / undertake library or archive visits in order to assist with their PhD studies.
• PhD students are encouraged to attend the annual writers’ retreat at Gregynog Hall, a country house with a distinguished artistic heritage that is set in glorious countryside in mid-Wales.
• PhD students are also encouraged to publish and advice can be sought from Creative Writing staff, all of whom are published authors.
• We offer teaching opportunities on the undergraduate degree and PhD students can undertake the School’s unique “Learning to Teach” programme, accredited by the Higher Education Academy.

Career Prospects 

The programme offers ideal preparation for those wishing to pursue careers in freelance writing and academia as well as journalism, publishing, teaching, public relations and arts management and administration.

Job roles: Writer, Lecturer, Editor, Head Teacher, English Teacher, EFL Teacher, PR Officer.

Employers: Universities from Cork (Ireland) to Wisconsin State (USA), Oxford University Press, Penguin Random House, Palgrave MacMillan, London Film School, Virgin Media, Literature Wales, Visit Wales.

Course structure:

• PhD students in Creative and Critical Writing are producing dynamic work both in established modes and forms and across a range of (hybrid) genres from experimental poetry and short stories to radio and film scripts, ambitious novels and innovative narrative non-fiction and are supported by supervisors who are experienced, published writer-academics with emerging and established international reputations. 
• Our students are further trained in the ability to reflect critically on their own work. 
• Though the balance between self-reflective analysis of the creative element on the one hand and the wider disciplinary and intellectual context on the other will vary according to the contours of each doctoral project, the commentary should be a rigorous evaluative analysis of the territory in which the creative work intervenes, and of the ways in which that intervention is accomplished.