Master's in Creative Writing

Welcome to Oxford University’s MSt in Creative Writing blog, a resource for Oxford events, calls for submission, competitions, news and interviews where you can keep in touch with our community of tutors and alumni.

Category: Events

MSt tutor Jenny Lewis & alumna Romola Parish at Science and Poetry event with St. Hilda’s College, Oxford

Tickets are now on sale for the third Science and Poetry event at St. Hilda’s College, organised by MSt tutor Jenny Lewis with Sarah Watkinson of St. Hilda’s. The event, on 9 Jun 2018, will feature poets Carrie Etter and Philip Gross and is themed around climate and environmental change. It will include an open mic for poems relating to the theme.

There will be a free workshop in advance of SciPo 2018, led by alumna Romola Parish and Sarah Watkinson at St Hilda’s College on 17 February, from 10.00-4.00. There will also be an opportunity to enter poems into a competition judged by Jenny Lewis.

Tickets for the SciPo events.

February 13, 2018
MSt tutor Rebecca Abrams discusses “The Jewish Journey”, Blackwell’s, Oxford, 25 Jan 2018

MSt tutor Rebecca Abrams will be discussing her new book The Jewish Journey at Blackwells Bookshop in Oxford, on Thu 25 Jan 18, 1– 2pm. The book explores the history of the Jewish people from antiquity to modern times through 22 objects from the Ashmolean Museum

eventbrite.co.uk/e/for-learning…

January 25, 2018
World Premiere of Russian opera based on MSt tutor Jenny Lewis’s “When I Became an Amazon”

MSt tutor Jenny Lewis attended world premiere of Russian opera based on her book When I Became an Amazon

20 November 2017 saw the world premiere of the chamber-opera ‘How I Became an Amazon’ by Russian composer Gennadyi Shiroglazov, based on the book When I Became an Amazon by Jenny Lewis (Iron Press, 1996). The opera was performed in English by soprano Olga Popova with Jenny herself reading two of the poems. Both were accompanied by a 30-strong chamber orchestra conducted by Valery Platonov – all from the Tchaikovsky Opera and Ballet Theatre of Perm. Russian translations by Natalya Dubrovina were printed in the programme. Depending on further funding, there are plans to develop the opera further and stage it in Moscow in 2018.

January 4, 2018
Kellogg College Creative Writing Seminar Series: Danielle McLaughlin, 1 February 2018

“Writing Our Obsessions”

Danielle McLaughlin’s stories have appeared in newspapers and magazines such as The Stinging Fly, The Irish Times,The Lonely Crowd and The New Yorker, and have been broadcast on RTE Radio 1 and BBC Radio 4. Her debut collection of short stories Dinosaurs on Other Planets was published in Ireland by The Stinging Fly Press in 2015, and in the UK (John Murray), US (Random House) and Slovakia (Inaque) in 2016. Together with Madeleine D’Arcy, she co – runs Fiction at the Friary in Cork .

Mawby Room, Kellogg College,
62 Banbury Road
5 pm (refreshments) for 5.30 pm

All are welcome and no bookings are necessary.

Seminar Convenor: Dr Clare Morgan

http://www.kellogg.ox.ac.uk/researchcentres/CW

December 22, 2017
Plays by MSt alumna Jingan Young & MSt tutor Amal Chatterjee in “Foreign Goods Last Forever 3″, 28 January 2018

Plays by MSt alumna Jingan Young and MSt tutor Amal Chatterjee feature in Jingan Young’s Pokfulam Rd Production’s “Foreign Goods Last Forever 3”

More information at Pokfulam Rd Productions.

December 6, 2017
MSt alumna Cressida Peever’s play ‘The Sound I Heard at Three Seventeen’, part of Theatre503’s Rapid Write Response on 26th & 27th November

MSt Alumna Cressida Peever’s 10-minute play ‘The Sound I Heard at Three Seventeen’ will be performed alongside six others responding to ‘The Dark Room’ as part of Theatre503’s Rapid Write Response.

At Theatre503 in Battersea, London
on Sunday 26th and Monday 27th November at 19:45

For more information and tickets, visit Theatre503

November 21, 2017
MSt tutor Roopa Farooki’s keynote speech at The Asian Writer Festival available online

The text of MSt tutor Roopa Farooki’s keynote speech on Saturday 21st October 2017 at the inaugural Asian Writer Festival is now available online.

November 20, 2017
Oxford Review of Books launch, 23rd November at Brasenose

The launch party for Volume 2, Issue 1 of theORB, sponsored by Prospect magazine, will be taking place this week in Brasenose College at 8pm Thursday 23rd November.

“You can pick up a copy of the magazine, hear a talk by celebrity academic John Mullan, and enjoy free wine and refreshments. Click the header image above for more details.”

November 20, 2017
MSt tutor Jenny Lewis reads at Armistice Day Requiem and Poetry Reading, Albion Beatnik Bookshop, Oxford, 11 Nov 2017

MSt tutor Jenny Lewis will be reading with Adnan al-Sayegh, Peter J. King, Jude Cowan Montague, Chinta Kallie, Ruba Abughaida and Jenyth Worsley at the Armistice Day Requiem and Poetry Reading at the Albion Beatnik Bookstore, from 7.30-9.30pm on Saturday 11 November to remember all victims of war, spoken in several languages. The event will feature a new requiem based on Wilfred Owen’s poem, ‘Futility’, composed by Janet Davies. .

October 23, 2017
MSt alumnus Quintin Pastrana profiled in Esquire magazine on the opening of his 500th library

from Esquire magazine

“Books Saved Him, So Now He’s Building His 500th Library: Quintin Pastrana’s Library Renewal Partnership bets on libraries as a way to save Filipino communities.”

from the article:

“For Barangay 105, Tondo, it started with a small space. Around 30 square meters, which—by the standards of a Metro Manila slum that’s so densely populated that it could not be relocated to Bulacan or Laguna—is not very small at all. In 2014, neighboring slumlords began encroaching on this precious empty parcel, and were just about to claim it for themselves before Remy Cabello, a local volunteer teacher, reached out to Quintin Pastrana for help. She told him that if she could not convince the slumlords that she could build a classroom with a library there, they would take it away.

“We had two weeks before they decided to close that place down,” says Pastrana, the founder of the Library Renewal Partnership, a coalition that builds libraries for literacy and community empowerment. “So we had a text brigade going on, emails, Facebook shoutouts—it was Christmas, anyway.”

Read the rest of the article on the website.

October 23, 2017