Birkbeck is one of the University Colleges of London and is situated in Bloomsbury, at the heart of literary London. The Birkbeck Writing Programme runs a wide variety of Creative Writing courses at every academic level, from the modular Certificate in Higher Education through to BA, MA, MFA and PhD. Our courses are designed to improve your creative writing, develop your reading and connect you to a community of readers, writers, editors and teachers. Our courses cover fiction, poetry, playwriting, screenwriting and life writing as well as opportunities to develop publishing skills and meet industry professionals. To find out more about our courses follow this link: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/study/all_courses/creativewriting.html

Why we write and why we read, spring from the same source. At the Birkbeck Writing Programme we see our role as preserving and promoting both of these activities. Like music or drama students, people study creative writing to see how far their talent can get them - and while many of our alumni are being signed by mainstream publishing houses, such as Jonathan Cape, Macmillan, Harper Collins and Sceptre – we are mindful that writing is as much a humanities subject as a vocational one. Our intimate, seminar-based approach to studying literature is a view from the inside, with an eye to reckoning how fiction works and how the world is represented in it. This is why, besides showing talent, we require our students to demonstrate a long-standing love affair with books.

          Our courses attract people of all ages, with a wide range of life experience, not just from London but from around the world, and who wish to pursue a private passion communally for a year or more. The Programme offers them the opportunity to read and ‘make’ literature under the supervision of published authors - authors who act as catalysts for new voices in both established and evolving forms of production. The hundred or so students enrolled on our courses each year create a live literary environment, of which the Writers’ Hub is just one example, and where as emerging writers they will begin to discover an audience.

Russell Celyn Jones is the author of Soldiers and Innocents (Jonathan Cape, 1990), Small Times (Viking Penguin, 1992), An Interference of Light (Viking Penguin, 1995), The Eros Hunter (Little, Brown, 1998), Surface Tension (Little, Brown, 2001), Ten Seconds from the Sun (Little, Brown, 2006), The Ninth Wave (Seren, 2010). He is widely anthologised as a short-story writer and a regular reviewer for The Times. He has served as a judge for the John Llewellyn Rhys prize, the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje award and the Man-Booker prize.

Julia Bell, MA (UEA), is a senior lecturer and novelist. Co-editor of The Creative Writing Coursebook (Macmillan 2001) and author of two widely translated novels Massive (Young Picador 2002) and Dirty Work (Young Picador 2007). She also established and is the managing editor of Birkbeck’s literary magazine, The Mechanics’ Institute Review and the Writers' Hub website. Her work reflects an interest in feminist readings of culture, the problems and paradoxes of British regional identity and the need to invigorate and champion independent publishing in an age of globalized media.

Colin Teevan’s plays include How Many Miles to Basra? (West Yorkshire Playhouse, winner of Clarion Award Best New Play 2006), Amazonia (with Paul Heritage for the Young Vic), The Diver and The Bee (both with Hideki Noda for Soho Theatre and Setagaya Theatre, Tokyo), Monkey! (Young Vic, Dundee Rep and West Yorkshire), Missing Persons: Four Tragedies and Roy Keane (Assembly Rooms and Trafalgar Studios) Alcmaeon in Corinth (Live! Theatre, Newcastle) and The Walls (National Theatre). His adaptations include Kafka’s Monkey (Young Vic, Wharf, Sydney and Malthouse, Mebourne), Don Quixote (West Yorkshire Playhouse), Peer Gynt (National Theatre of Scotland, Dundee Rep and Barbican) and Svejk. His translations include Bacchai (National Theatre), Iph… (Lyric Theatre, Belfast), Cuckoos and Marathon (Gate Theatre). Colin has written over ten plays for BBC Radios 3 and 4 and is an Artistic Associate of West Yorkshire Playhouse.

Toby Litt is a senior lecturer on the MA and is the author of the novels: Beatniks, Corpsing, deadkidsongs, Finding Myself, Ghost Story, Hospital, I play the drums in a band called okay, Journey into Space, and King Death. He has also published two books of short stories:  Adventures in Capitalism and Exhibitionism. He was chosen as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists in 2003. Along with Ali Smith, he edited the New Writing 13 anthology. He reviews for The Guardian and The Financial Times, and appears regularly on Radio 3’s The Verb.  He is a member of English PEN. His website is at www.tobylitt.com.

Jeremy Sheldon was born in 1971 in London. He gained an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. He also works as a screenwriter and as a script-consultant for several film production companies. His first book was a collection of short stories, The Comfort Zone (2002). This was followed by a novel in 2005 - The Smiling Affair - a literary thriller about ghost-hunter Jay Richards. Jeremy Sheldon is a tutor on the MA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London, and at Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine.

Benjamin Wood is a Lecturer in Creative Writing. A tutor and first-year convenor for the BA Creative Writing, he also co-ordinates Birkbeck’s Certificate of Higher Education in Creative Writing. In 2004, he was awarded a Commonwealth Scholarship to attend the MFA Creative Writing programme at the University of British Columbia, Canada. During his tenure as fiction editor of Canadian literary journal, PRISM international, the publication was awarded the Writers’ Trust of Canada/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize. Benjamin’s short fiction has appeared in several international journals, including Event, Geist, and Red Ink. His novel, The Bellwether Revivals, was shortlisted for the inaugural Sony Reader Award category at the 2010 Dylan Thomas Prize and will be published by Simon & Schuster in spring 2012.

Liane’s books of poetry include Leaving Eden (2010) and Frankie, Alfredo,(2009). Selections of her poems have been included in the The Art of Wiring (2011),  Ask for It by Name (2008) and The Like of It (2005) and she is represented in Future Welcome: The Moosehead Anthology X (2005) and on Lifelines, Poets for Oxfam (CD) (2006) as well as in the forthcoming Split Screen: Poetry Inspired by Film and Television. She is a guest poet on Clive James's Website, reads her work in and around London and abroad and is published regularly in magazines on both sides of the Atlantic as well as online. Her next collection, We’re All Fine, is due out in 2012.