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.
In celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the Oxford Creative Writing MSt, we are proud to announce the publication of Meridian. A collection of poetry, prose and dramatic writing from twenty-five acclaimed alumni of the programme, curated by Amal Chatterjee, Mary Jean Chan and Barney Norris, the book includes an introduction by founding Course Director Clare Morgan, and a foreword by George Szirtes, recent recipient of the King’s Gold Medal for Poetry. You can buy your copy here.
MSt tutor Professor Sophie Ratcliffe has been named as the 2026 recipient of the E.M. Forster Award by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
The $20,000 award recognises an outstanding writer from the United Kingdom or Ireland, and previous recipients include Julian Barnes, Carol Ann Duffy, Jeanette Winterson, Kate Atkinson, and Alan Hollinghurst.
Founded in 1898, the American Academy of Arts and Letters celebrates artistic excellence across literature, music, and the visual arts. Authors are nominated by Academy members, with winners selected by a rotating committee of writers. The 2026 committee was chaired by Mona Simpson, alongside Henri Cole, Adam Gopnik, and Yiyun Li.
Sophie’s writing explores the intersections of literature, philosophy, history, creative criticism, and fiction. Her publications include The Lost Properties of Love (2019), published in the United States as Loss, A Love Story (2024), and On Sympathy (2008). She is currently writing a novel, and completing an academic book on children and libraries, supported by a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship. Her edition of P. G. Wodehouse’s Letters was reissued by Penguin in 2025.
Alongside her academic work, she is a regular reviewer for the national press.
Sophie will receive her award at the Academy’s annual Ceremonial in New York in May.
On May 15th, MSt alumnus Ollie Randall is publishing the first of a pair of forthcoming books on cricket and culture with Fairfield Books.
Writers in Whites is the untold story of cricket’s influential role in London’s literary world, from the 1880s to the 1960s. PG Wodehouse used his cricket-playing to launch his writing career. JM Barrie modelled the pirates in Peter Pan after his cricket teammates. Arthur Conan Doyle named Sherlock Holmes after a cricketer he’d played against. They all belonged to a network of cricket-playing writers, who collectively left a permanent legacy on English culture.
Their teams went by various names, but most often they called themselves the Authors. Based on a wealth of new research, Writers in Whites tells the story of this group, from Jerome K. Jerome via Evelyn Waugh to Michael Morpurgo. It wasn’t simply that lots of important writers happened to like playing cricket together. The very act of playing for the Authors influenced their careers and their writings – both through networking opportunities and by helping to shape their cultural outlook. The literary cricketers weathered scandals and ferocious culture wars, but they also wrote numerous memoirs describing their antics on and around the cricket field.
Writers in Whites draws on their books and unpublished letters, letting these men narrate, in their own words, how literary cricket played a key role in their lives. The full story – which provides a fresh way of viewing English cultural history from the 1880s to the 1960s – has never been told before. Literary cricket played a role in the rise of mass literature before the First World War, and in rallying resistance to the Modernists in interwar London. It also drew in some of the great names of twentieth-century Test cricket, such as CB Fry, Douglas Jardine, Learie Constantine, Len Hutton and Richie Benaud as well as cricket writers and reporters such as EV Lucas, Neville Cardus, EW Swanton and Henry Blofeld.
The book is available to pre-order here.
Kellogg College Centre for Creative Writing
Mawby Room, Kellogg College,62 Banbury Road
5.00 pm (refreshments) for 5.30 pm
Hilary Term Week 7:
Wednesday 4th March 2026
The Poetry of Engagement
Three award-winning Rack Press poets, John Fuller, Nicholas Murray and John Barnie, explore the role of small presses in the poetry scene and the challenges of writing politically engaged poetry that speaks to the present moment. John Fuller has published fifteen collections of poetry and is Fellow Emeritus at Magdalen College, Oxford. Nicholas Murray is a poet, novelist and literary biographer who has written on Bruce Chatwin, Andrew Marvell and Matthew Arnold. John Barnie is a prolific poet and essayist, and editor of Planet: the Welsh Interationalist for sixteen years. He was writer in residence at the Oxford Museum of Natural History where his poetry focused on his concern for nature and environmental issues.
Seminar Convenor: Dr Clare Morgan
Centre for Creative Writing – Kellogg College
All are welcome and no bookings necessary.
We are delighted that MSt alumna Theresa Lola has been awarded the Walcott Prize. Honoring the work of St. Lucian Nobel Prize poet Derek Walcott, the prize is offered annually for a book of poetry by a non-US citizen published anywhere in the world. This year’s prize was judged by Ishion Hutchinson.
Theresa’s collection is available to buy here.
We are delighted to announce that recent alumna Isabelle Baafi has won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Isabelle’s extraordinary work is available in all good bookshops; you can also buy it here.
Award-winning novelist and MSt alumnus Chris Barkley will speak at the Oxford Centre for Creative Writing, Kellogg College on Wednesday, February 4th at 5pm. Please see full details below for this event:
Creative Writing Seminar Series
Kellogg College Centre for Creative Writing
Mawby Room, Kellogg College,
62 Banbury Road
5.00 pm (refreshments) for 5.30 pm
Hilary Term Week 3:
Wednesday 4th February 2026
Chris Barkley
Sharing a Mystery: The Science of Stories
Chris Barkley’s debut novel, The Man on the Endless Stair was released in summer 2025 and
was described in The Times as ‘An eerie, deeply atmospheric tale of hidden treasure and
trauma.’ He was appointed Writer in Residence by the Edinburgh Book Festival in 2022 and
has won the Oxford University Kellogg Writing Competition as well as the Bedford
International Writing Prize. He achieved a distinction on the MSt in Creative Writing at the
University of Oxford and has taught creative writing at Yale. Edinburgh is where he stays.
Seminar Convenor: Dr Clare Morgan
https://www.kellogg.ox.ac.uk/kellogg-centres/centre-for-creative-writing/
All are welcome and no bookings are necessary
Departmental Lecturer Barney Norris’s collaboration with Sting, The Last Ship, is currently playing a sold-out run at the Royal Theatre Carre in Amsterdam, and will then tour to the Seine Musicale in Paris, the Glasshouse Theatre in Brisbane and The Metropolitan Opera New York, before returning to the Carre for a second season in the autumn. You can book tickets here.
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