Literature Courses in London
Explore our exciting range of Literature courses, from Literary History, to specialist courses in Fiction, Poetry and Drama. We offer introductory and in-depth courses to suit all levels of interest and experience, where you can revisit classic texts and discover new writers.
Study in-person or online from the comfort of home, with classes that allow you to participate in discussions with fellow adult students and share your passion for literature as part of a learning community. We offer daytime, evening and weekend courses, both short and long.
Our tutors are experts in their fields and experienced educators; many also teach in universities or share their expertise in the media. Tutors share their knowledge and passion for fiction, poetry and drama through presentations, readings, interactive discussion, analysis, and other activities.
Many students return to take more courses, telling us they enjoy being part of our City Lit literary community; others are inspired to progress onto university study.
Our popular courses often sell out quickly, so we invite you to browse and book your place now.
- Poets of the Silver Age, the Revolution and the TerrorCourse start date: Fri 13 Jun 2025
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Stephen WinfieldThis course will look, decade by decade, at the leading figures of the generation caught up in the turmoil of the Revolution whose lives and poetry together form a veritable seismograph of the unfolding tragedy. Their extraordinary interrelationships and the originality and power of their writing constitute one of the richest periods in the history of Russian Literature.Full fee £119.00 Senior fee £95.00 Concession £77.00 - Literary Landscapes: Black London in Caleb Nelson’s Open Water and Sam Selvon’s The Lonely LondonersCourse start date: Thu 26 Jun 2025
Location on this date: Online
Black London is shifting and ever-evolving. This course explores how Costa award winning Caleb Nelson’s novel ‘Open Water’ and the great 1950’s classic of immigrant fiction, Sam Selvon’s ‘The Lonely Londoners’ reimagined our multicultural metropolis.Full fee £79.00 Senior fee £79.00 Concession £79.00 - Christopher and his Kind: Christopher Isherwood in BerlinCourse start date: Fri 27 Jun 2025
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Jake PollerThe 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 - The Best of Contemporary PoetryCourse start date: Fri 4 Jul 2025
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Lewis WardOn this in-college literature course we will take the temperature of the contemporary poetry scene through close readings from the 'Forward Book of Poetry 2025', which showcases poems from the best collections recently published in the UK and around the world.Full fee £119.00 Senior fee £95.00 Concession £77.00 - Gender, Desire and the Body in PoetryCourse start date: Tue 8 Jul 2025
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Ranging from sixteenth century love sonnets via bawdy Restoration verse to a Victorian eroticised poetic narrative, this course examines how the language of love and desire, and the poetic representations of gendered bodies, provide an idiom that can be used to express both conservative and more subversive cultural ideas.Full fee £79.00 Senior fee £63.00 Concession £51.00 - Global Literatures: Han Kang & Elif ShafakCourse start date: Wed 16 Jul 2025
Location on this date: Keeley Street
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 - Shakespeare's Women: Hamlet, Macbeth and As You Like ItCourse start date: Thu 2 Oct 2025
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Sophie OxenhamThis Literature course will look at three of Shakespeare’s female characters: Rosalind (As You Like It), Ophelia (Hamlet) and Lady Macbeth (Macbeth). We will consider their wit, madness and ambition, exploring Shakespeare’s language, the historical context, and the plays in performance.Full fee £79.00 Senior fee £63.00 Concession £51.00 - Angela Carter: ‘A Different Kind of Human Being’ -Course start date: Wed 8 Oct 2025
Location on this date: Online
Tutors: Fiona McCullochThis course will introduce and discuss the fiction of renowned author, Angela Carter, specifically focusing upon one novel and one short story. Carter wanted her writing to ‘demythologise the fictions that regulate our lives’, to explore how society narrates us into being and holds us there. In doing so, she offers us a chance to read and, ultimately, release ourselves through her work, as we come to understand the relationship between fiction and reality. For Carter, both of these – fiction and reality – are two sides of the same coin.Full fee £129.00 Senior fee £129.00 Concession £84.00 - ‘Stranger’ Things: Muriel Spark’s ShapeshiftingCourse start date: Wed 5 Nov 2025
Location on this date: Online
Tutors: Fiona McCullochThis course will introduce and discuss two novels by eminent author, Muriel Spark- Memento Mori (1959) and The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960). Her writing wilfully upends notions of conformity and acts as a disrupter to accepted conventions. Instead, ‘Spark beckons us to encounter the stranger’ (Marilyn Reizbaum). Playfully disrupting passive readers and stretching comfort zones, Spark’s work provides a space to access unaccustomed outlooks that make us rethink our relationship with ourselves, others, and the world. Instead of unconsciously going with the flow, she awakens us to life’s stranger things.Full fee £129.00 Senior fee £129.00 Concession £84.00 - 20th to 21st Century War Poetry: British and InternationalCourse start date: Thu 6 Nov 2025
Location on this date: Online
Tutors: Stephen WinfieldExplore the astonishing range of poetic responses to a hundred years of warfare, acts of witnessing, endurance, defiance and condemnation by writers across the globe: Sassoon and Wilfred Owen in Britain, Brecht, Milosz, Celan, Akhmatova and Stepanova in Europe and Russia, Darwish and Zhadan in the Middle East and Ukraine, and many others. How do they describe the indescribable? High art or doggerel, what does it matter once the bombs start to fall?Full fee £129.00 Senior fee £103.00 Concession £84.00 - Women with a view: British short fiction of the mid-centuryCourse start date: Thu 12 Jun 2025
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Patricia SweeneyExplore and discover extraordinary short stories from renowned women writers of the 1940s and 50s, which present an insight into a time of great change in Britain, when domestic situations were rewritten, social customs challenged and new freedoms embraced. Authors include Elizabeth Bowen, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Penelope Mortimer, Elizabeth Taylor and Daphne du Maurier.Full fee £119.00 Senior fee £95.00 Concession £77.00
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