New Courses
From boxercise to writing about music, we are regularly expanding our offering and adding more courses for you to choose from. Don't forget to check back to see what's new at City Lit.
Whether you are looking to take up a new hobby, pick up a new skill or learn more about your area of interest, we have the course for you.
Featured Courses
- Fairytales RemadeCourse start date: Wed 21 May 2025
Location on this date: Online
Tutors: Fiona McCullochThis online course introduces a selection of fairy tales from the First Golden Age of Children’s Literature, occurring in the latter half of the 19th century until the early 20th century. We will focus upon L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (1911), George McDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin (1872), and Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby (1863).Full fee £199.00 Senior fee £199.00 Concession £129.00 - Writing MotherhoodCourse start date: Tue 3 Jun 2025
Location on this date: Online
Tutors: Rebecca JonesExplore the extraordinarily diverse world of writing about motherhood, looking at literary texts that have firmly rebuked any notions of motherhood as ‘merely’ domestic, and have instead made it the subject of serious literary writing, have explored major themes such as the body, trauma, gender, queerness, race and creativity, and have written diverse truths about the realities of motherhood. Writers include Toni Morrison, Adrienne Rich and Rachel Cusk, Maggie Nelson and Ayò¿bámi Adébáyò¿.Full fee £119.00 Senior fee £95.00 Concession £77.00 - British Literature of the 1930s: Brits AbroadCourse start date: Tue 23 Sep 2025
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Lewis WardOn this in-college literature course we will explore what some of the most significant British authors of the period did and thought on their travels, real and imagined, in the decade leading up to World War II. Authors include Graham Greene, Christopher Isherwood, Jean Rhys and George Orwell.Full fee £179.00 Senior fee £179.00 Concession £116.00 - Solitude in fiction and memoirCourse start date: Tue 30 Sep 2025
Location on this date: Online
Tutors: Kate WilkinsonThis online literature course explores representations of solitude in recent fiction and memoir. Reading twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts, we’ll consider experiences of solitude across rural and urban settings, from remote islands to crowded cities. How is solitude shaped by places, culture, gender, age and technology?Full fee £179.00 Senior fee £179.00 Concession £116.00 - Reflecting the Nation: 21st Century British Drama & SocietyCourse start date: Mon 6 Oct 2025
Location on this date: Online
This course explores how dramatists use their position as commentators to reflect the societal and political issues affecting the nation. Drawing on texts by Laura Wade, Jez Butterworth, Roy Williams and others, we’ll discuss how issues such as class, national identity, queer and black lives, and activism have been interrogated by Britain’s finest contemporary playwrights.Full fee £179.00 Senior fee £179.00 Concession £116.00 - 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 - Black British LiteratureCourse start date: Thu 9 Oct 2025
Location on this date: Online
From Roman society to the present day, from the memoirs of Equiano to the experimental poetics of Kwesi Johnson, Black British writers have significantly impacted British literature, despite limited recognition.
Through an exploration of social, political and historical contexts, this course examines how diasporic writers decolonised genres and mapped their own metaphors onto the literary landscape.Full fee £179.00 Senior fee £179.00 Concession £116.00 - Making it Modern: A Survey of 20th century poetryCourse start date: Mon 13 Oct 2025
Location on this date: Online
Tutors: Suzannah V. EvansWhat makes a poet modern? What is the different between modern poetry and modernist poetry? How has modern poetry informed the work of poets writing today? Come and explore the exciting range of poetry written in the twentieth century in a supportive and energising group context.Full fee £219.00 Senior fee £219.00 Concession £142.00 - The Contemporary Global NovelCourse start date: Fri 7 Nov 2025
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Rebecca JonesAre you curious about reading contemporary global literature? Would you like to understand what we mean by the ‘global novel’, reading across cultures and national borders? This in-college course will introduce you to the study of global literature through reading three brilliant 21st century global novels: Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, Rana Dasgupta’s Tokyo Cancelled and Julie Otsuka’s Buddha in the Attic.Full fee £149.00 Senior fee £149.00 Concession £97.00 - 'Foreign films': European cinema from the fiftiesCourse start date: Mon 28 Apr 2025 (and 1 other date)
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: John WischmeyerThey were called ‘foreign films’ in the fifties, the first films to emerge from Europe and further to a wider British and American audience: Bicycle Thieves (1948 Vittorio De Sica) Rashomon (1950 Akira Kurosawa), Pather Panchali (1955 Satyajit Ray), Seven Samurai (1954 Akira Kurosawa), The Seventh Seal (1957 Ingmar Bergman), Plein Soleil (1960 Rene Clement). They played at The Academy Oxford Street or The Everyman Hampstead. Once you overcome the one-inch tall barrier of subtitles, you discover a whole world of amazing films. Too many filmgoers are scared off by the notion of international cinema. In cultural shorthand, ‘foreign film’ was a euphemism for snootiness, a stereotype that kept audiences from experiencing some of the greatest movies ever made. Once you open yourself up to them you’ll find there’s nothing to be intimidated by.Full fee £199.00 Senior fee £199.00 Concession £129.00 - First Novels Revisited: Amis, McEwan, Barnes, IshiguroCourse start date: Tue 29 Apr 2025
Location on this date: Keeley Street
Tutors: Lewis WardMartin Amis, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro are household names of contemporary British fiction. But how did their careers begin in the 1970s and 1980s? And how do their early efforts stand up today?Full fee £169.00 Senior fee £169.00 Concession £110.00
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