Courses - Online & in London

Explore classic texts of 19th century French and Russian literature, discussing literary style, themes, and contexts as a way of developing and sharing responses to celebrated European writing. Among the French writers examined will be Stendhal, Baudelaire, Flaubert and Rimbaud, with our Russians including Pushkin, Lemontov, and Tolstoy.

Who were considered the ‘Best of Young British Novelists’ in 1983, and what became of them? What do their styles and topics reveal about the decade, looking back from 40 years on? Read extracts by all twenty writers plus novels by Pat Barker, Graham Swift and Julian Barnes.

An introduction to the beautiful and delicate printmaking world of Japanese Woodcut. Explore this water based, non-toxic process and build an appreciation for the handmade. You will learn how to design, carve and make a multi-coloured print. Beginners welcome.

Would you like to be more confident in the way you write whether emails or reports at work or messages to friends? Do you want to work on how you form sentences, understand grammar and use punctuation so your writing is more creative? Do you want to learn how to create meaning in your writing?. This course will help you be more secure in your professional, academic or creative writing skills and help you improve some of your weak areas around forming and punctuating sentences with appropriate grammatical form. You will develop your confidence in the most essential areas of writing including different sentence structures, writing paragraphs, using punctuation effectively, using active and passive voices and proofreading.



You need to do a pre-course assessment. Contact universal.skills@citylit.ac.uk / 020 8078 0489 for a face-to-face assessment or click the Start Assessment button on this page. Log on with your email address (not name).



This course is FREE if you are employed and on a low wage or you are claiming benefits. For more information Click here

Develop a greater understanding of art history and how to analyse the cultural meaning of an artwork by going in-depth with the ideas of prominent art historians. This course is meant to cultivate your personal practice of art history through small, guided research and writing projects.

Arguably, no other music has been as influential as Cuban music in the 20th century. From being the foundation of Salsa music in the Americas, to its return home in Africa, the Cuban sound has travelled far and wide. But how did this relatively small island in the Caribbean have such a large musical influence, and why was it so readily accepted?

Explore imaginative, dynamic approaches to painting the figure using a variety of approaches: be inspired by new ways of seeing and access innovative ways of approaching your life painting.

This class explores the work of Bob Dylan, examining his song writing, musical style, and persona in the context of American cultural, political, and musical history, exploring how Dylan engages with American culture through his absorption and reworking of multifarious aspects of both historical and modern Americana.

Learn to speak Greek and develop your speaking and listening skills on this communicative course, which emphasises the practical use of the language.

Enjoy talking with other people about the things you have read? Want to share great stories, poems and drama? Come along and join the conversation. The group is led by a shared reading practitioner trained by The Reader Organisation.

How do you keep on top of your notes, to do list, tasks, meetings and ideas? Are you still using paper notebooks and post-it notes? Is there too much in your head cluttering your mind? This course will show how to use the digital notebook, OneNote, in conjunction with Outlook, and integrate both apps with OneDrive so you become an organised and self-managing administrator. You will learn how to take notes at any time and arrange them so you can always find what you are looking for. You will practise how to integrate Outlook and OneNote so you can organise meetings and share meeting notes and minutes easily and quickly, record the meetings, relate sections of the audio to tasks and action points for yourself and others, create to do lists, and link these tasks to tasks and emails in Outlook . In addition you will learn other useful tips on how to make the most of OneNote, for example to make calculations, translate text and edit text inside images. By the end of the course you will have clear idea of how to be organised digitally and have developed the necessary skills to put your ideas into practice.



This course is FREE if you are employed and on a low wage or you are claiming benefits. For more information Click here

We look at four poets who struggled to be heard or accepted because their work was so different from what their society expected. What were the barriers they had to overcome and how did they win through to become admired and highly regarded? What made one of the poets stop writing at the age of 21 and the other three continue for the rest of their lives? What makes the poetry of all of them so original, and what can we learn from their resilience?