Courses in London & Online

New courses added for 2025/26

The biggest choice of adult education short courses in London and online.

Looking for a course? City Lit has you covered. We have lots of courses, guided walks, expert talks, and events — more than any other college in London.

Whether you’re interested in a one-off talk or taster class, a short course over a few weeks, or a year-long programme. You'll find a course to suit your schedule and goals.

We offer online courses as well as hybrid and blended learning, and in-person courses in London.

 

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City Lit is a leading provider of adult education in London and all over the UK. It's the perfect place to learn something new, gain new skills, and build your confidence. From mastering new languages and honing creative skills to advancing your career with professional development courses. Whatever your passion or goal, our diverse curriculum has the perfect course to inspire your next step.

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All our courses are led by expert tutors including published authors, academics, practising artists, and experienced professionals; and they look forward to sharing their valuable knowledge and experience with you.


City Lit is a leading provider of adult education in London and all over the UK. It's the perfect place to learn something new, gain new skills, and build your confidence. From mastering new languages and honing creative skills to advancing your career with professional development courses. Whatever your passion or goal, our diverse curriculum has the perfect course to inspire your next step.

 

 

 

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  1. Modern American Satire
    Course start date:  Wed 18 Jun 2025

    Location on this date:  Keeley Street

    Tutors:  Alexander Fairbairn-Dixon
    Come and explore the work of three pioneering American satirists of the inter-war years. Ranging from sharp, dry, bitter irony to macabre laughter, the precise insights of Dorothy Parker, Nathanael West, and Sinclair Lewis still resonate with modern readers. We’ll look at their dissection of society, considering their critiques of social aspiration, snobbery, status anxiety, and The American Dream.
    Full fee £169.00 Senior fee £135.00 Concession £110.00
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  2. Full fee £79.00 Senior fee £79.00 Concession £79.00
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  3. Christopher and his Kind: Christopher Isherwood in Berlin
    Course start date:  Fri 27 Jun 2025

    Location on this date:  Keeley Street

    Tutors:  Jake Poller
    The experience of living in Berlin in the early 1930s had a transformative effect on the life and work of Christopher Isherwood. In this course, we will discuss Isherwood’s masterpiece, Goodbye to Berlin (1939), and his autobiography Christopher and His Kind (1976), which reveals the real people behind the characters of Sally Bowles and Otto Nowak, and shines a light on the queer culture of Berlin Isherwood was unable to write about in the 1930s.
    Full fee £49.00 Senior fee £39.00 Concession £32.00
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  4. Global Literatures: Han Kang & Elif Shafak
    Course start date:  Wed 16 Jul 2025

    Location on this date:  Keeley Street

    Tutors:  Lizzy Attree
    Join us for an exploration of the ways we experience global literatures of our time. Inter-generational memory is the focus of two prize-winning novels, The Vegetarian (2007) by Han Kang and The Island of Missing Trees (2021) by Elif Shafak. Unearthing the painful truths of history in the context of culturally/politically divided Korea and Cyprus, the authors deal delicately, and brutally, with love, the environment, patriarchy, resistance and the metamorphosis of the female body.
    Full fee £49.00 Senior fee £39.00 Concession £32.00
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  5. Contemporary British and international fiction
    Course start date:  Wed 17 Sep 2025

    Location on this date:  Keeley Street

    Tutors:  Aamer Hussein
    We will be looking at novels from recent years that explore various dimensions of culture and society, reading and discussing a brief and careful selection of novels in English from several countries, diverse in style and genre. Titles include Piranesi, Susanna Clarke's mysterious and 'weird' tale of secrets and lost texts, William Boyd's Trio, which follows the life of an actress, a film producer, and a writer obsessed with the suicide of Virginia Woolf, Small Things Like These by Clare Keegan, in which a coal merchant becomes involved with the fate of a pregnant teenager trapped in a Magdalene Laundry, and Michelle de Kretser's Theory and Practice follows the academic trajectory of a Sri Lankan feminist researching the novels of Woolf.
    Full fee £259.00 Senior fee £207.00 Concession £168.00
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  6. City Lit reading group 1
    Last Few Places
    Course start date:  Fri 19 Sep 2025

    Location on this date:  Keeley Street

    Tutors:  Kate Wilkinson
    Share thoughts and ideas about what you are reading, with books chosen by the group. Please come to the first session on Friday 29 September with suggestions (contemporary fiction in paperback) and having read 'Story of the Forest' by Linda Grant. Meetings take place on 19/9, 24/10, 28/11, 30/1, 27/2, 27/3, 1/5, 29/5, 26/6.
    Full fee £239.00 Senior fee £191.00 Concession £155.00
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  7. City Lit evening reading group
    Evening
    Course start date:  Mon 22 Sep 2025

    Location on this date:  Online

    Tutors:  Claire Allen
    Share thoughts and ideas about what you are reading, with books chosen by the group. Please come to the first session with suggestions (contemporary literary fiction in paperback) and having read 'The Wren, The Wren' by Anne Enright. We meet on the following dates: 22/9, 20/10, 24/11, 12/1, 16/2, 16/3, 11/5, 8/6, 6/7.
    Full fee £189.00 Senior fee £189.00 Concession £123.00
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  8. Literary Science
    Course start date:  Mon 22 Sep 2025

    Location on this date:  Keeley Street

    Tutors:  Julian Birkett

    From the theory of evolution to quantum physics and artificial intelligence, modern science has upended our understanding of the world and our place in it. How have writers of fiction responded to these radical changes?
    We consider a range of fiction, including Frankenstein by Mary shelley, Angels and Insects by AS Byatt, Copenhagen by Michael Frayn and Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro.

    Full fee £259.00 Senior fee £207.00 Concession £168.00
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  9. Victorian Visions
    Course start date:  Tue 23 Sep 2025

    Location on this date:  Keeley Street

    Tutors:  Julian Birkett
    “It was the best of times…it was the worst of times.”



    How did the Victorians see the world? They lived through one of the most dramatic periods in our history – and their literature reflects that. Victorian Visions looks at a wide variety of themes in Victorian culture: from the city to the home, from dreams to nightmares, from faith to doubt, from moralism to decadence, from ideology to empire.
    Full fee £259.00 Senior fee £207.00 Concession £168.00
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  10. Full fee £179.00 Senior fee £179.00 Concession £116.00
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  11. Full fee £19.00 Senior fee £15.00 Concession £12.00
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  12. Full fee £149.00 Senior fee £119.00 Concession £75.00
    Rating:
    97% of 100
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  13. An Introduction to Japanese Crime Fiction
    Evening
    Course start date:  Thu 25 Sep 2025

    Location on this date:  Keeley Street

    Tutors:  Christine Hawkins

    This course explores the development of the crime fiction genre in Japan from 1920s to the present. We begin with some historical context on how/why the genre developed in Japan when it did. The texts covered include The two-sen copper coin by Taro Hirai(1923),  Koga Sabura’s The Spider (1930), and the following novels - Seishi Yokomizo’s The Honjin Murders (1946), Seicho Matsumoto’s, Point Zero (1957), Soji Shimada’s, The Tokyo Zodiac Murders (1981), and Malice (1996) by Keigo Higashino.

     

    Full fee £179.00 Senior fee £179.00 Concession £116.00
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  14. City Lit reading group 2
    Course start date:  Fri 26 Sep 2025

    Location on this date:  Keeley Street

    Tutors:  Patricia Sweeney
    Share thoughts and ideas about what you are reading, with books chosen by the group. Please come to the first session with suggestions (contemporary literary fiction in paperback) and having read 'Absolutely and Forever' by Rose Tremain. Monthly meetings take place on 26/9, 31/10, 5/12, 23/1, 20/2, 20/3, 8/5, 5/6, 3/7.
    Full fee £239.00 Senior fee £191.00 Concession £155.00
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  15. Nineteenth Century American Literary Classics
    Course start date:  Fri 26 Sep 2025

    Location on this date:  Keeley Street

    Tutors:  Richard Niland
    This class explores the wonderful world of 19th century American literature, reading classic texts to broaden knowledge of literary history through a range of influential novels, stories, and poems. Among the writers considered in their literary, political, and cultural contexts will be Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, Mark Twain and Kate Chopin.
    Full fee £219.00 Senior fee £175.00 Concession £142.00
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