Literature Courses in London

This one-day Literature course will give you an introduction to texts from across centuries, languages and national borders, both within and beyond the English-speaking world. We will focus on two African literary classics: Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, giving you an understanding of these texts and a new appreciation of the world’s rich literary heritage in all its diversity and complexity.

Spend a day exploring The Children, a naturalistic and funny play that tackles serious themes as it charts an encounter between three retired nuclear scientists. Leading playwright, Lucy Kirkwood, received a Writers Guild Best Play Award for The Children, which premiered Downstairs at the Royal Court Theatre in 2016, followed by a run on Broadway in 2017, and was revived at Nottingham Playhouse in 2024.

Come and dive with us into the rich world of literary writing about motherhood – in texts that reveal motherhood’s simultaneous rawness and beauty, exhaustion and joy, moments of pure exhilaration juxtaposed with the utterly mundane. We’ll explore the links between the personal and the political, and the role of literary fiction and non-fiction of making sense of motherhood as both an individual experience and an institution (to borrow Adrienne Rich’s terms). Authors include Adrienne Rich, Rachel Cusk, Maggie Nelson and Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀.

In celebration of Windrush Day, join us for a lively celebration of Benjamin Zephaniah, one of Britain’s most dynamic poets! This short, interactive course explores his life, his fiery poetry and the themes which make his work resonant today. Through readings, discussion and performance, you’ll get a real sense of why Zephaniah’s words continue to inspire.

This course looks at freshly translated or newly rediscovered gems of international writing from the second half of the 20th century. Texts include The Way to Colonos by Kay Cicellis (Greece); God’s Bits of Wood by Sembene Ousmane (Senegal); Behind the Portrait by Siburapha (Thailand); and Woman in the Pillory by Brigitte Reimann (Germany).

This course covers the thematic concerns, dramatic styles and contextual influences of three plays from the 20th and 21st centuries: Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (1944), David Hare’s The Judas Kiss (1998) and Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Sweat (2015). Drawing on the plays’ production histories, it considers how dramatists and theatre practitioners have represented the social, cultural and political worlds of specific times and places.

The last couple of decades have seen an explosion of a relatively new kind of writing - the memoir. Stories of abusive childhoods, extraordinary parents, and uncovered family secrets fill the shelves of bookshops. Some are mockingly dubbed misery memoirs, some even exposed as fakes. But among them are some masterpieces of modern writing - accounts of painful coming to maturity, or of the growth towards a deeper understanding of a world always taken for granted. We will read and consider a selection.