Writing Courses & Workshops Online & in London

Come and explore London in writing! On this course we’ll study fiction and non-fiction texts about London. Contemporary perspectives on the city include two recent novels: Happiness by Aminatta Forna and Light Perpetual by Frances Spufford.

Explore representations of London in works of dystopian/science fiction, written between the 1890s and the 1970s. Our authors will include HG Wells, John Wyndham, George Orwell and Nigel Kneale.

This 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).

Come and explore the work of three pioneering American satirists of the inter-war years. Ranging from sharp, dry, bitter irony to macabre laughter, the precise insights of Dorothy Parker, Nathanael West, and Sinclair Lewis still resonate with modern readers. We’ll look at their dissection of society, considering their critiques of social aspiration, snobbery, status anxiety, and The American Dream.

We will be looking at novels from recent years that explore various dimensions of culture and society, reading and discussing a brief and careful selection of novels in English from several countries, diverse in style and genre. Titles include Piranesi, Susanna Clarke's mysterious and 'weird' tale of secrets and lost texts, William Boyd's Trio, which follows the life of an actress, a film producer, and a writer obsessed with the suicide of Virginia Woolf, Small Things Like These by Clare Keegan, in which a coal merchant becomes involved with the fate of a pregnant teenager trapped in a Magdalene Laundry, and Michelle de Kretser's Theory and Practice follows the academic trajectory of a Sri Lankan feminist researching the novels of Woolf.

Share thoughts and ideas about what you are reading, with books chosen by the group. Please come to the first session on Friday 29 September with suggestions (contemporary fiction in paperback) and having read 'Story of the Forest' by Linda Grant. Meetings take place on 19/9, 24/10, 28/11, 30/1, 27/2, 27/3, 1/5, 29/5, 26/6.

Share thoughts and ideas about what you are reading, with books chosen by the group. Please come to the first session with suggestions (contemporary literary fiction in paperback) and having read 'The Wren, The Wren' by Anne Enright. We meet on the following dates: 22/9, 20/10, 24/11, 12/1, 16/2, 16/3, 11/5, 8/6, 6/7.

From the theory of evolution to quantum physics and artificial intelligence, modern science has upended our understanding of the world and our place in it. How have writers of fiction responded to these radical changes?



We consider a range of fiction, including Frankenstein by Mary shelley, Angles and Insects by AS Byatt, Copenhagen by Michael Frayn and Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro.

“It was the best of times…it was the worst of times.”



How did the Victorians see the world? They lived through one of the most dramatic periods in our history – and their literature reflects that. Victorian Visions looks at a wide variety of themes in Victorian culture: from the city to the home, from dreams to nightmares, from faith to doubt, from moralism to decadence, from ideology to empire.

On 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.

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.

Share thoughts and ideas about what you are reading, with books chosen by the group. Please come to the first session with suggestions (contemporary literary fiction in paperback) and having read 'Absolutely and Forever' by Rose Tremain. Monthly meetings take place on 26/9, 31/10, 5/12, 23/1, 20/2, 20/3, 8/5, 5/6, 3/7.

This class explores the wonderful world of 19th century American literature, reading classic texts to broaden knowledge of literary history through a range of influential novels, stories, and poems. Among the writers considered in their literary, political, and cultural contexts will be Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, Mark Twain and Kate Chopin.

Passion, marriage, crime, class, and murder: these are just some of the key issues at play in the three exhilarating French novels we will discuss in this online course. Focusing on George Sand’s Indiana (1832), Balzac’s Père Goriot (1835) and Zola’s Thérèse Raquin (1868), we’ll explore French literary style and the influence of serialisation on sensation fiction and these author’s depictions of social class, romance, and realism.