Roy Mcfarlane FRSL is a poet, playwright and former youth and community worker born in Birmingham of Jamaican parentage spending most of his years living in Wolverhampton and the Black Country, now residing in Brighton. He has published numerous poetry collections and teaches the Advanced Poetry course on Wednesday afternoons. 

Bethan Roberts is the author of five novels including My Policeman and the story of a 1950s policeman. She has been a tutor on the Creative Writing Programme for four years. Here she talks about her writing life.

Katy Massey writes fiction, scripts and memoir and teaches on the two-year Life Writing Programme.

Sue Orton finished the Life Writing Programme in 2022 and has since self-published her memoir Gathering Threads, which she started during the course. Here she talks about her writing journey.

Congratulations to course alumna Jane Crittenden whose second novel SUMMER EVER AFTER is published by Lake Union today!

Sophie Anderson took the Creative Writing Programme from 2016 to 2018. She has since had two novels – The Butterfly Garden and The Sapphire Cove – published and is currently out on submission with her third.

Sharlene Teo is running a two-day course in June on Writing Otherness – how to write different perspectives from our own. Here she talks about her debut novel, her work as a creative writing lecturer and the importance of confronting our biases, privileges and stereotyped perceptions when writing fiction.

Louise Kenward’s anthology Moving Mountains: Writing Nature Through Illness and Disability was published last autumn. Here she talks about how taking the Creative Writing Programme from 2015-17 helped to kickstart her writing dream and offers some advice on writing while living with pain and fatigue.

Longstanding CWP tutor Hannah Vincent has had a short story broadcast on Radio 4. The story, entitled Stew Woman, is part of the broadcaster’s Short Works series. 

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?