Equipped with a reader’s report on your full manuscript, author and editor Sophie Cunningham will lead you through the process of re-drafting your novel, by focusing on key ideas and strategies from plotting to characterisation and style. Over six fortnightly sessions, you’ll workshop your re-drafts and stress-test the decisions you’ve made, exploring what works and what could be made stronger in your novel.

Speculative fiction is a universe unto itself. How do you navigate this widely popular genre without losing your way? In this new and innovative course, you will learn from two leading writers in the genre as you discover the ins and outs of writing outside the realms of the ordinary.

Successful crime fiction writers may find their work on bestseller lists and even making the leap to movie and television screens. The writing can be hardboiled, action-packed, even philosophical in nature, making crime fiction a diverse genre. This course will take you through the fundamentals of crime fiction, while affording you space to develop your own craft.

Over the course of six months, you’ll submit newly written or revised material for constructive feedback from fellow Writing a Novel graduates and your tutor. Between fortnightly workshop sessions, you’ll have access to our zoom channel for a “shut up and write” session with your peers, where you can write material for your next workshop session and maximize the value of the bi-weekly workshops.

In an intimate group of ten writers, Lauren Chater will guide you through a workshopping process designed to strengthen the opening chapter of your work-in-progress, at the level of the line, the paragraph, and the story, giving you skills you can continue to apply to your manuscript as a whole.

This course will teach you the fundamentals of essay writing, while working on your own piece, covering craft essentials including style, subject, structure, tone and argument. From Montaigne on, this malleable, hybrid and ever-evolving form has been a perennial place of experimentation, where the writer can trial ideas, explore the world around them, test statements and pose new questions.

This two stage course will assist you in completing a finished manuscript draft, looking critically at a wide range of forms and subject, designed to accommodate any type of nonfiction project: memoir, history, essay collection, investigative study, immersive explorations of other lives and situations, and experimental work.

For emerging novelists ready to dive in and make the commitment to complete a full manuscript, this intensive course will guide you through the process of planning and beginning your novel, developing essential skills in writing and composition, as well as establishing a dedicated writing practice.

Page one, chapter one: this is where you start. In a close-knit supportive group, this 12-week course will nurture you through the fast and furious stage of committing the first words of your novel to paper.

A fascination with history can be transformed into daring works of fiction. In this course, writers will discover opportunities to illuminate the past and learn how to shape and write compelling fiction based on rich historical sources. Whether your goal is to write short stories, a novella, or a full-length manuscript, this program will help open your mind to the creative possibilities of historical fiction.

For emerging fantasy, science fiction and horror novelists ready to dive in and commit to completing a novel, this rigorous course will guide you through the process of planning, applying essential skills in writing (and reading) to the specialised art of speculative fiction, as well as establishing a dedicated writing practice toward completion of your project.

Do you have a strong idea for a middle grade or young adult novel but you’re struggling to get started? Or perhaps you’re part way through, you’ve run out of puff, and you’d like some fresh perspective? Books written by adults for younger readers have their own parameters and problems to solve. In an intimate class of up to 12 fellow authors, tutor Shivaun Plozza will help get your writing flowing so you can feel confident in bringing your story to life.

Explore the communal act of short story writing in this six-week course with award-winning author Emma Hislop (Kāi Tahu), learning how to deepen your connection to craft and each other and find new ways to approach short fiction writing.

Project plan your manuscript with one-on-one consultations with a leading writer.

You will be paired with a leading author for a series of fortnightly one-on-one consultation sessions to discuss your work, and help you negotiate the roadblocks and challenges you might be facing.