<p>These are the names of the Uni’s? Do they offer full-time on the BA degree? Thanks once again for helping me. I really couldn’t have anyone else answer my questions.</p>
<p>Yes, they are the names of unis that offer the FT BA. </p>
<p>There are a few others that offer it, but it really isn’t worth your time crossing the Atlantic to go to the likes of Teesside or London Metropolitan.</p>
<p>MJay, you do not need a degree in creative writing to be an author.</p>
<p>I would bet that most, maybe even all, of the British authors you admire do NOT have degrees in creative writing.</p>
<p>British society is very peculiar. It has these strange cultural stratifications. In many ways, there are different Britains that different British people live in. I don’t know whether the unis that boomting listed are part of the Britain that YOU are looking for. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t.</p>
<p>It would help if you would list the British authors that you admire, so we can help you find the particular Britain you are looking for.</p>
<p>KEVP</p>
<p>KEVP has a point; Britain isn’t a homogenous society. There are differences in terms of class, ethnicity, religion, wealth (or lack thereof), north/south, rural / urban, the three countries & cultures of England, Scotland and Wales … what you think of as being Britain may not be entirely accurate. </p>
<p>And don’t forget that universities tend to be populated by young, white, middle class, well educated urbanites … they are often not diverse in the way that the rest of Britain is. And there’s limited creative inspiration to be had from life at uni, unless you just want to write something like Fresh Meat.</p>
<p>I know there’s a lot of authors who don’t have degrees or anything, but I feel like I just need a little more help on this, and prepare myself for it. I don’t know.
I know one author right now, her name is E.L James, I believe she’s from England? I heard that she’s from there but I’m not sure.</p>
<p>EL James, as in, that high brow author who wrote 50 Shades? </p>
<p>She’s from London, and studied history at Kent, according to wikipedia. </p>
<p>Not that you should be basing your life path on what she has done - she started out writing Twilight fan fic! </p>
<p>Note that if you were to study English then you would spend a lot of time looking at the classics - Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen etc. etc. I’d be horrified if 50 Shades made it onto the curriculum of any self-respecting course.</p>
<p>If you mean PD James rather than EL James (!), then yes, she’s English. She also never went to university - her father didn’t believe in educating girls.</p>
<p>She worked for the British Government for decades and most of her novels are based on her experiences there. She’s a fantastic example of a self-taught observational author - she lived life and wrote about how she and others lived it. </p>
<p>If you want to be a writer the most important thing you need to do is write. Every day. Writing is like music; it’s an art and it requires discipline. You also need to read. Again, every day. Read as many different genres and authors as you can across history.</p>
<p>At the undergraduate level I would encourage you to go for any degree you like the sound of and write in your spare time. You don’t need an English/Creative Writing degree to apply for MA programmes; what you need is a strong portfolio.</p>
<p>E.L. James (who I have not read) does seem to have gone to the University of Kent, where she read (what we Yanks call “majored in”) history.</p>
<p>So you might want to look at the University of Kent for either history or English lit.</p>
<p>You probably should think of some other British writers you admire, rather than just basing your life on one. If at least a couple of them went to the U of Kent, then I think it is seriously worth considering.</p>
<p>But note that E.L. James does NOT have a degree in “Creative Writing”. I don’t think you will find ANY well-known British author that has a degree in “Creative Writing”. “Creative Writing” would be the sort of subject that British people would consider rather frivolous and basically “American”. Which is why so few British colleges and unis offer degrees in it.</p>
<p>As Laylah said, the great writers learned to write by reading, by observing human life, and most of all by WRITING, not by getting degrees in “Creative Writing”. And that certainly applies to E.L.James, although I doubt many here would consider her a “great” writer.</p>
<p>KEVP</p>