Dates: Every Monday 9:30-11am BST, starting 2 June 2025 and running for five consecutive weeks through the whole of June.
Fee: £350 for those in paid and secure employment, or otherwise able to afford the course fee; £250 for postgraduates, those who have been made redundant in Higher Education, or other contingent HE staff.
A Zoom link and further information about the course will be provided upon payment of the course fee.
An early-bird discount of 10% on both fee types is available until 15 March 2025.
Select the start date from the calendar to book your place.
Scroll down for full course details.
Original price was: £350.00.£315.00Current price is: £315.00.
Start your summer of writing the right way! Writing for a general audience is extremely rewarding and can readily complement the kinds of writing for very specific audiences that an academic career often entails. However, good writing for the general public has distinctive features that need to be learned and honed in order to write successfully for audiences who do not necessarily have academic expertise. On this course you will learn these skills through reading the work of others who have made the transition between academic and general audiences, and by developing your own writing under the guidance of an expert course tutor who has successfully straddled both worlds.
Each week we will look at an extract from a piece of creative non-fiction by an academic writer which we will then discuss in detail, thinking about what we can learn from the extract as both writers and researchers. Authors are likely to include Robert Macfarlane, Chris van Tulleken, Lucy Green, David Farrier, Helen Mort, Anna Fleming, Esther Rutter, and Noreen Masud. We’ll consider how each writer uses their skills as an academic to bring authority to their writing, while also examining their choices around narrative voice, language, register, and the issue of the too-often-forbidden ‘I’. We will pull out ideas and tips that will be useful as you develop your own creative non-fiction pieces, including how to tell a story, imagined audience, how to combine research and story-telling, and whether and how to get personal.
Each class will include some writing time using prompts based on the issues discussed. There is no pressure to share work in class though there will be opportunities to do so, and at the end of the course you will be able to submit a piece of non-fiction (maximum 3,000 words) to me for detailed feedback.
If you’d like to kickstart your summer of writing then this course is for you.
Learning outcomes:
About the course tutor:
Dr Kerri Andrews is an author, researcher and teacher. She holds a PhD from the University of Leeds and has taught in UK Higher Education for twenty years. Her most recent researched edition, Nan Shepherd’s Correspondence, 1920-80, has been longlisted for the 2024 Saltire Book Award Research Book of the Year. She is the author of the best-selling Wanderers: A History of Women Walking, which has sold over 50,000 copies, and is the editor of the first-ever anthology of women’s writing about walking, Way Makers. Her most recent researched edition, The Correspondence of Nan Shepherd 1920-1980, was longlisted for the 2024 Saltire Book Award Research Book of the Year. Her new book, Pathfinding: On Walking, Motherhood, and Freedom will be published by Elliott and Thompson in March 2025.
