Birkbeck is one of the University Colleges of London and is situated in Bloomsbury, at the heart of literary London. The Birkbeck Writing Programme runs a wide vartiety of Creative Writing courses at every academic level, from the modular Certificate in HIgher Education through to BA, MA, MFA and PhD. Our courses are designed to improve your creative writing, develop your reading and connect you to a community of readers, writers, editors and teachers. Our courses cover fiction, poetry, playwriting, screenwriting and life writing as well as opportunities to develop publishing skills and meet industry professionals. To find out more about our courses follow this link: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/study/all_courses/creativewriting.html

Why we write and why we read, spring from the same source. At the Birkbeck Writing Programme we see our role as preserving and promoting both of these activities. Like music or drama students, people study creative writing to see how far their talent can get them - and while many of our alumni are being signed by mainstream publishing houses, such as Jonathan Cape, Macmillan, Harper Collins and Sceptre – we are mindful that writing is as much a humanities subject as a vocational one. Our intimate, seminar-based approach to studying literature is a view from the inside, with an eye to reckoning how fiction works and how the world is represented in it. This is why, besides showing talent, we require our students to demonstrate a long-standing love affair with books.

          Our courses attract people of all ages, with a wide range of life experience, not just from London but from around the world, and who wish to pursue a private passion communally for a year or more. The Programme offers them the opportunity to read and ‘make’ literature under the supervision of published authors - authors who act as catalysts for new voices in both established and evolving forms of production. The hundred or so students enrolled on our courses each year create a live literary environment, of which the Writers’ Hub is just one example, and where as emerging writers they will begin to discover an audience.

Russell Celyn Jones is the author of The Ninth Wave, Seren (2009); Ten Seconds from the Sun, Little Brown (2006); Surface Tension, Little, Brown (2001); The Eros Hunter, Little, Brown (1998); An Interference of Light, Viking Penguin (1995); Small Times, Viking Penguin (1992); Soldiers and Innocents, Jonathan Cape (1990) and Little, Brown (1998). His short fiction has been widely anthologized. He has been awarded the Society of Author’s Award, Welsh Arts Council Fiction Prize, David Higham Prize and the Weishanhu Award (China). He has judged the Man Booker Prize, the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatji Prize and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, and is a reviewer for The Times.

Julia Bell is a novelist and Senior Lecturer on the Birkbeck Writing Programme. She has published two novels for young adults - Massive and Dirty Work, both published by Macmillan in the UK. She also co-edited the bestselling Creative Writing Coursebook. Find her at www.juliabell.net

Toby Litt was born in 1968 and grew up in Ampthill, Bedfordshire. He has worked as a teacher, bookseller and subtitler. A graduate of Malcolm Bradbury’s Creative Writing MA at the University of East Anglia, he is the author of Adventures in Capitalism, Beatniks, Corpsing, deadkidsongs, Exhibitionism, Finding Myself,Ghost Story, I play the drums in a band called okay, Journey into Space and the forthcoming King Death. He is a Granta Best of Young British Novelist and a regular on Radio 3’s The Verb. His website is at www.tobylitt.com