The start of the year is always a time for new year’s resolutions, and setting (or resetting) a regular writing habit is likely to be near the top of the list for many of us writers and poets.

Here poet and CWP tutor John McCullough offers his top writing tips to keep you maintaining your writing practice through the festive season. They’re relevant to both poets and prose writers.

This month Lisa Fransson’s debut novel The Shape of Guilt is published, with a launch at Brighton’s Waterstones bookshop. Lisa took the Creative Writing Programme from 2014-2016. Here she talks about her writing life.

Sue Wallace-Shaddad took the Advanced Poetry Workshops in 2022 and earlier this year Clayhanger Press published her collection Sleeping with Clouds, a collaboration with artist Sula Rubens. Here she talks about her poetry journey.

Here novelist, short story writer, playwright and CWP tutor Hannah Vincent offers her top five writing tips.

An alumna of our creative-non-fiction course, here she talks about her writing life.

Kate Bradley’s third novel The Sisterhood was published by Simon & Schuster this spring. An alumna of the Creative Writing Programme, here she talks about how the course set her on course to publication.

Course alumnus Amy Lavelle’s second novel comes out this month. Here she talks about how the Creative Writing Programme set her on course to be a published author.

Jane Crittenden’s debut novel Worlds Apart comes out this month, published by Amazon. Here she talks about how taking the Creative Writing Programme helped to kickstart her dream of writing a novel.

If you’re an aspiring writer, should you do a degree, or an MA or MFA in creative writing? There are now hundreds of creative writing courses, undergraduate degrees, MFA’s and MA’s being offered by American and English universities. Are they worth the money? Is it worth getting qualified as a writer?