New Courses 

During the 1920s, Aldous Huxley was beguiled by D.H. Lawrence and his life-affirming philosophy, but after moving to California in 1937 he became increasingly influenced by mysticism. He was initiated by Swami Prabhavananda of the Hollywood Vedanta Society, who would become Christopher Isherwood’s guru. On this course, we will explore how the spiritual interests of these British writers shaped the literary work they wrote in America.

This course is specifically aimed at the mobile therapist wishing to offer clients a hot and cold stone massage, without the need to carry a massive traditional hot stone heater around with you!

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.

This 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.

This in-college literature course delves into the provocative and unsettling world of contemporary body horror - primarily by femme and queer authors. Over six-weeks we will explore how writers reframe the body as a site of both violence and transformation: using aesthetics of the uncanny, grotesque or abject to disturb and overturn societal norms surrounding gender, sexuality, identity, and power.

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.

What 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.

On this practical introductory course, you will develop solid foundational skills in Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign, following a natural print workflow. You will learn essential tools and techniques to manipulate images in Photoshop, create basic designs in Illustrator, and lay out single-page documents in InDesign. Additionally, you will explore how these programs integrate to enhance your creative projects.

What is a short story? Come and discuss its characteristics, its length, design, mood and style. What distinguishes it from other kinds of short narrative? We’ll compare short stories to other forms, such as myths, legends, anecdotes, fabliaux, parables, fables, and ‘tales’. We’ll look at some of the greatest practitioners including Edgar Allan Poe, Katherine Mansfield, and O’ Henry.

The katabasis or journey into the underworld is a standard element of many classical texts. This course explores what this journey and the return to the world above means in a selection of Greek and Roman texts with examples taken from mythological poetry, epic, and Athenian drama. We will also look at how later writers (Joseph Conrad, Margaret Atwood, Elena Ferrante) adopt and adapt this trope using it to explore colonialism, feminism and motherhood.