Creative Writing, English Literature and Film Studies

We provide the perfect setting for you to explore these overlapping academic fields of study in all their richness and diversity and for you to grow as a reader, critic and writer. In 2025 we joined the wider newly formed School of Humanities, a growing group of cognate subject areas, enabling us to maximise the opportunities this offers to our staff and students.

Our programmes are characterised by creative and critical engagement with processes of writing, language and textual production in relation to a variety of contexts, including social, cultural, political and environmental. We have a strong international dimension and sponsors exchanges with Japan, America and European countries. ​

We combine cutting-edge research with passionate teaching, fantastic careers support, and a varied calendar of extra-curricular and social events. To ensure that you are exposed to fresh ideas and new authors throughout your degree, you are taught by different lecturers with diverse approaches. We keep our class sizes small so that you receive as much individual attention as possible and are able to engage in debate and seminars.

The Culture-Media-Text Research Centre co-ordinates interdisciplinary work on literature, film, media and other forms of culture. The centre hosts visiting lectures and performances, including an annual symposium exploring a topic of current critical interest from interdisciplinary perspectives. Researchers in the centre were  instrumental in the establishment of Winchester University Press. We also play a leading role in the interdisciplinary Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Research.

Public Engagement

We are an outward-looking department and our academics regularly participate in public engagement events, such as the Winchester Heritage Open Days. We also work closely with organisations such as the English Project and Hampshire Cultural Trust, as well as the Winchester Poetry Festival and Winchester Theatre Royal. These collaborations provide a wealth of exciting opportunities to our students.

Our particular expertise in song lyrics is evidenced in our frequent contributions on the topic to The Conversation, where academics publish research-informed articles with journalistic flair.

Latest news and events

2025

November: Creative Writing PhD student combating demonisation of people with albinism

Author and research student Martin White’s PhD focusses on an often demonised section of society: albinism. Read the full story.

October: Creative Writing graduate launches comedy podcast

Creative Writing graduate Brendan Way is one of the team behind a new comedy podcast following a team of hopeless monster hunters in a fictional Nevada desert town. The new spooky serial, Welcome to Hole, launched on 29 October - just in time for Halloween. Read the full story.

August: Just a minute! The ten best songs under a minute long

Brevity is soul of wit, all good things come in small packages - let's face it, we all know it: short is sweet. Our song lyrics and all-round pop guru Dr Glenn Fosbraey shares his ten favourite sub-60 second songs, from the fifties to the noughties. Happy (snappy) listening! Brief encounters - the ten best songs under a minute long

March/April: It's a Querty kind of Magic

Members of the public were able to join poet, academic and typewriter enthusiast Dr Mark Rutter (photo) at the Winchester School of Art for a fun hands-on event as part of the Type-Mono-Type exhibition, where typewriter poetry meets visual art.

2024 news

In October 2024, Dr Matthew Leggatt, Senior Lecturer in English and American Literature, launched a new podcast series on Utopian and Dystopian Fiction, which looks at the differing depictions of Utopias and Dystopias in fiction and film. Matthew presents the podcasts with Liam Knight from the University of Birmingham, and for one of the episodes, the pair chatted with Dr Daniel Varndell, Senior Lecturer in English Literature. Listen to the podcasts.

In July 2024, The University renewed its successful partnership agreement (in place since 2018) with Winchester Poetry Festival. At the signing ceremony, Reader in English and Creative Writing Dr Julian Stannard (pictured above) gave a reading of three short poems from his bilingual collection Sottoripa: Genoese Poems. Dr Stannard recently won the prestigious Lerici Anglo-Liguria Prize, which honours English language poets who pay tribute to the literary traditions of the Lerici and Liguria area of northwest Italy, frequented in the past by Byron, Shelley and DH Lawrence among others. 

From 26 to 28 April 2024, authors and academics Dr Mark Rutter and Judy Waite (photo below) could be found at the Bournemouth Writing Festival, with The Stanza Room: a Querty Type of Magic, a celebration of the trusty typewriter. Find out more on our website and the festival website.

March 2024 saw the launch of Breaking Barriers, a book that shares 100 personal accounts of mental ill health, recovery and connection, edited by Dr Glenn Fosbraey and Creative Writing graduate Katie Pether, who now works for the Department for Education as a Mental Health First Aid Instructor.

Image top of page: the first page of the epic poem Beowulf, written in an Anglo-Saxon dialect. Image from Wikimedia Commons.