Granta Writers’ Workshop
Championing New Voices
Since its inception as a literary quarterly in 1979, Granta has been committed to championing the best in new writing. As part of our ongoing mission to support new and emerging writers, we have developed a programme of workshops with our education partners Professional Writing Academy. These courses are designed to offer writers the tools to develop their technical skills, and the ability to understand the nuances of excellent literary craftsmanship.
These online, tutored courses are hosted on a fully accessible virtual platform, available anywhere in the world, offering flexible learning at a time and pace to suit individual needs. Each course draws on the archive of world-class literature published in the pages of Granta over the past forty years. Students will develop their authorial voice while honing their prose through practical assignments, one-to-one tutor feedback and peer learning with a cohort of committed students. Bursary-funded places will be available on each course for those in financial need.
Course entry is by application.
Course completion opens up our Alumni Space, which provides ongoing access to industry professionals, including authors, Granta editors and literary agents.
About the Courses
Nature Writing: Rewilding Language
Never has there been a greater need for writers who can communicate about the environment in clear, immediate and powerful ways, who can envisage the past as well as the future.
What is the role of the nature writer today? Drawing on non-fiction, fiction and poetry from the Granta archive and beyond, we’ll examine the roots and future possibilities of nature writing in its broadest sense. You’ll finish the course with a 3,000-word piece of your own work, a sense of where nature writing has been and where you – and your voice – might take it.
Duration: 8 weeks
Price: £1,000
Writing Memoir: Unlocking Memory and Shaping Experience
Sometimes to refute a single sentence it is necessary to tell a life story.
Life-writing purports to tell a true story – one drawn from lived experience – but at what point does reality give way to artfulness? This immersive, six-month course of study will challenge your understanding of what memoir means, and show how the tools of writing can be used to examine the boundaries of the self and push at the limitations of memory. The course will equip you with the skills and confidence to produce the first 10,000 words of a book-length work of memoir. Discover why memoir writing has become one of today’s most significant – and experimental – genres.
Duration: 24 weeks
Price: £3,000
Writing Literary Short Fiction
A story is supposed to be a vehicle for astonishment.
Where does originality in authorial voice come from and how do you innovate in the short form? What is narrative verve and how do you sustain it while holding and delighting readers? The course experience will be both playful and profound, considering the big-picture issues of motivation and intention that power a story while focusing in on the drama of the sentence and poetics of word choice, imagery and detail in the condensed form.
Participants will emerge with a finished 3,000 word (maximum) piece of fiction and increased awareness of the submissions process.
Duration: 9 weeks
Price: £1,200
Writing Literary Long-form Journalism
Given the chance, our imagination will take us out of chaos, and replace the randomness of disaster with the heroics of human will.
Transcend straight news reporting and explore topical issues in depth and from different angles, finding new ways to engage readers with the defining particulars of our times. You will leave this intermediate-level course with up to 10,000 words of long-read reportage or narrative non-fiction, and enhanced knowledge of what it takes to find, pitch, research, structure and sustain an idea in long-form.
Duration: 26 weeks
Price: £3,000
If you have any queries regarding these courses, please email us on workshops@granta.com.