Explore History, Culture & Writing

Have you started work on your novel? This course is suitable for experienced creative writers who want to make progress with a novel draft. Learn more about the art of novel writing and move your project forward in a supportive workshop environment.

For experienced writers, this supportive but rigorous workshop offers the perfect opportunity to develop your novel or short story. Receive in-depth feedback and benefit from detailed group discussions on the art of fiction.

Develop your poetry, taking it in new directions and maturing your poetic voice. Various approaches and techniques will be explored, and new poetry can be workshopped. For experienced poets only.

Fit creative writing into your busy day: a relaxed, informal rolling programme for writers of all levels of experience who enjoy being thrown new ideas and experimenting with poetry and prose.



This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.

Dive deeper into the key elements of writing for the theatre, gain fresh critical insight into your own writing, and produce a new draft of your work. This course is designed for experienced playwrights who have work in-progress.



This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.

Curious about art history? Join us for this taster session where we explore different ways into visual art and its histories, from the ancient to the contemporary.



This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.

Some moments in our lives are so powerful they beg to be shared with the world. This continuation course guides students in developing a memoir project that will resonate and inspire.

On this ongoing workshop you will develop your work-in-progress with constructive feedback from tutor and classmates. You need to have completed a ‘Writing for children’ course before joining this class.

Would you like to write a picture book text for young children? This course is designed for children's writers and for illustrators wishing to write their own stories; a starter course to develop both your ideas and your technique.



This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.

Come and join us at the Cultureplex Ciné-Club, where once a week, for 12 weeks (and throughout the rest of the academic year), we will watch and discuss film. Taking its cue from the famous Parisian ciné-club set up by the celebrated critic and writer, André Bazin, ‘the single thinker most responsible for bestowing on cinema the prestige both of an artform and of an object of knowledge’, and the man who foresaw the emergence of film studies as a legitimate discipline of academic study, our contemporary incarnation of the film club will offer a curated series of films for detailed study, discussion and debate. Each film will be introduced, placed in both its cinematic, cultural and historic context. In sharing our viewing in City Lit’s premier screening room, the Cultureplex, we will approximate the experience of watching film in the cinema, one that is intense and fully focussed in a way that other modes of viewing often are not. After the screening we will devote the rest of the class to a collective exploration of the film, led by the tutor, but involving everyone in a participatory discussion that will allow all to express their responses, their views, their thoughts on the film screened.

This course will develop your critical appreciation of the cinema by teaching you how to read and understand film texts. We will look at the elements that underpin film form – narrative, mise en scène, cinematography, editing and sound – alongside its historical development. We will consider film style by exploring classical, post-classical and art cinema and we will examine influential critical modes of analysis, such as genre, authorship and spectatorship.



This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.

This advanced workshop is designed for students who have already completed introductory and intermediate creative-non fiction courses and would like to focus on workshopping their writing.



This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.

So you've finished your novel. What's next? This short course provides guidance in submitting to agents and publishers, and helps you to tailor your work to maximise its potential in the marketplace.



This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.