Module Directory

This module encourages students to draw upon personal life experiences in order to experiment with, and enrich, the form and style of their creative writing. It does this through a series of practical workshops and through the close reading of texts. The module is aimed at both writers who wish to write in this way for the first time, or who want to deepen their practice.

The module examines a variety of writers who have collectively attempted to understand the complexity of being alive within a particular culture at a specific time. As Annie Ernaux, the 2022 Nobel Laureate for Literature notes, this type of work sets out, ‘to anchor the story of the rift in my social being in the situation that had been mine.’ The attempt to investigate, engage with, and articulate the social structures and personal attitudes that have shaped and defined each of us – and so consequently led to the way we live our lives – allows us to gain a clearer understanding of the way they have affected us, (both knowingly and unknowingly) and it is this process that can inform and enrich our writing.

Thus, during this module students will try to find new and as yet, unwritten constructions that allow for the possibility of a ‘more complete expression of their situation.’ Memoir and Life-writing uses personal material as a means of contributing to the development of literature’s aesthetic form. The module also investigates the intersection between life writing and memoir.

‘Now, all I did was put the feelings on paper next to the events that caused them, and everybody loved it’. Nazli Koca (author of The Applicant)

(From the University’s mission statement: ‘Our research-led education will focus on enhancing our students’ ability to articulate and apply their creative and analytical research mind-set to the benefit of their studies, their future lives and communities’)

The aims of this module are:

• To develop and investigate practical ideas about narration and subject.


• To develop students’ quality of prose writing.


• To develop critical thinking in the area of Memoir and Life Writing.


• To develop an understanding of the variety of forms Memoir and Life Writing can take.


• To encourage each student to develop and enhance their own individual creative practice in the production of Memoir and Life Writing.

By the end of the module, student will be able to:

1. Demonstrate their deepened writing skills in connection to Memoir and Life Writing.


2. Demonstrate and apply their knowledge and understanding of the variety of forms the area of Life Writing and Memoir covers.


3. Engage with and contribute to the critical discourse about this subject.


4. Engage with and apply the development process of rewriting and redrafting.

1. Personal memory and the historical record

This seminar examines the way the juxtaposition of personal memories with contemporaneous news items from newspapers and books can build a rich and complex narrative. The key text here is Ernaux’s The Years who uses this ‘bricolage’ technique extremely effectively.

Writing exercise: Juxtaposition of historically recorded material with personal memory.

2. Detail and focus

This seminar looks at the way a close focus on a particular event can bring it to life for the reader. The primary text here is Knausgaard’s, A Death in the Family’ which shows how the selection of many tiny details in a text can build to create powerful and moving material.

Writing Exercise: Focussing on minutiae to bring a scene to life.

3. Life writing

This module looks at some of the elisions that occur between ‘life writing’’ and ‘memoir’ and discusses the distinctions and techniques that distinguish the two. The key texts for this seminar are Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Nazli Koca’s The Applicant and Rachel Cusk’s Outline.

Writing Exercise: Personally experienced events written as fiction.

4. The Body

This module focusses on the description of the body whilst it reacts during the recall of past events. It pays particular attention to the way feeling is addressed by the writer as they write.

Key texts: Giving Up the Ghost by Hilary Mantel, The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk.

Writing Exercise: How does the experience of present day feeling enter the narrative of the description of the past?

5. Movement

This module examines the way movement and pace can be connected to structure, and how a wider narrative can be generated by close focus on an array of closely observed material from different time periods. The key texts are. Leila Berg’s Flickerbook as it uses a flickering narrative structure and Walser’s The Walk which uses a ‘perambulatory’ style.

Writing Exercise.

(a). The use of fast-moving images.

(b). The ‘perambulatory’ style and use of slow moving imagery.

6. Short interlinked essays

This book looks at the sway a book of short essays that link together thematically through the first-person narrator can build a complex and ambivalent picture of a world view. The key texts are Zadie Smith’s, Six Essays and W.G. Sebald’s Campo Santo.

Writing Exercise: Separate approaches to the same theme.

7. Daily activity that allows for the illumination of past history.

How can the immersion in a present day activity provide a structure that helps the reader ruminate and illuminate the past? The key text here is Murakami’s What I think about when I think about Running.

Writing exercise: Linking memory to present day activity.

8. Writing trauma

This seminar focuses on ways of writing about trauma. One technique is the use of ‘you’ as a way of referring to the first person as in Machado’s writing which explores extremes of domestic abuse and violence. The second text is by Jean Améry and is a deeply moving and frightening text about torture. Both writers use distancing techniques to allow the reader to engage with this difficult material in an attempt to communicate the impossible.

At the Mind’s Limits by Jean Améry and In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado.

Trigger warning: This seminar does deal with very difficult material.

9. The Historian and the personal

This seminar looks at the way carefully curated historical documents and analysis is inflected and shaped by the personal experience of the historian. The seminar discusses some of the ways in which ideas of balance and subjectivity can be integrated into historical analysis.

The key book is Afterlives of War by Mike Roper.

Writing Exercise: Writing the historical record. Students are asked to access an historical document that has a connection to their/their family’s history.

10. Focus on students own work and conclusion

The final seminar looks back over the module to revise themes and to focus on the development of each student’s writing style paying particular attention to successful work.

The module will be delivered via:

• One 2-hour seminar per week.

These follow department guidelines. Currently attendance is compulsory on campus.