This newly redesigned six-month poetry course led by Maurice Riordan is for the serious, committed poet working towards a first pamphlet or collection.

In weekly workshops, you'll cover everything from form, structure and tone, to taking a deeper look at topics such as versification, improvisation and poetry in translation. You'll be learning from your tutor and your course mates – as well as guest poets throughout the course, who will lead one-off workshops, host readings and performances and answer questions about their writing life and working in the poetry world.

This is an intensive course, designed to enable everyone to advance their writing over the six months of the course. The cumulative objective is for you to assemble a pamphlet-long portfolio of workshopped and redrafted poems in that period.

Maurice Riordan was born in Co. Cork. His first book, A Word from the Loki (1995), was nominated for the T. S. Eliot Prize, as was The Water Stealer (2013). Floods (2000) was a Book of the Year in the Sunday Times and Irish Times. The Holy Land (2007) won the Michael Hartnett Award. His new collection, The Shoulder Tap, is forthcoming from Faber in 2021. He has taught at Imperial College and Goldsmiths College, and is Emeritus Professor of Poetry at Sheffield Hallam. Riordan was Editor of The Poetry Review, 2013-17.

Dates: 10 October 2024 - 3 April 2025
Location: London
Cost: £3000

Find out more and apply here