New MA in crime fiction at UEA

The University of East Anglia is adding a Masters in Crime Fiction to its Creative Writing programme, which will launch in September 2015.
 
The new Masters will address the genre from a critical, theoretical and historical perspective as well incorporating a large Creative Writing component. Publisher Little, Brown will be supporting the course by sponsoring a £3,000 award for one student and also reading the manuscripts each student will produce by the end of the course, providing feedback and links to publishing opportunities.
 
It will be a low-residency course, with students attending three short residential periods a year over the two-year programme. These residential periods will introduce students to key industry professionals, including literary agents and publishers, and major writers in the genre, who will run masterclasses. Ongoing creative and critical projects, presentations and interactions will continue between visits to the UEA.
 
The MA will also be launching with at least one full fees bursary, provided by UEA’s Centre for Creative and Performing Arts.
 
Course director, author Henry Sutton, said: “Crime and thriller fiction is the most popular literary genre in the world - one in every three books sold in the UK is a crime novel and sales of crime fiction have risen by 80 per cent in the UK in the last decade. The UEA Creative Writing programme provides an ideal context in which to nurture and embrace this trend, and to engage creatively and critically with the world’s dominant adult literary genre, by offering a fully specific crime writing MA.”
 
Little, Brown’s group publisher David Shelley said: “At Little, Brown we are passionately committed to crime fiction and to discovering the best new talent in the genre - so we are very proud to be working closely with UEA and sponsoring this award. We also believe that crime fiction deserves to be taken seriously as an art form, so we're particularly delighted that UEA is launching this landmark MA which is a real statement of intent.”
 
The announcement comes just days before the inaugural ‘Noirwich’ Crime Writing Festival launches in Norfolk. The festival - a collaboration between UEA, the Crime Writers' Association, the University of East Anglia, Waterstones and Writers' Centre Norwich - will feature leading international crime authors including Val McDermid, Sophie Hannah and Megan Abbott in a five-day programme of events from Wednesday 10th September.
 
Sutton added: “Crime fiction is coming in from the cold, and is increasingly being taken seriously as a literary form. All readers, writers and students of literature have much to learn and enjoy from this most vibrant, diverse and dynamic of genres. We want Norwich, and UEA, to be at the creative and critical forefront of the discussion.”

Novelists Malcolm and Angus Wilson established the UK’s first MA in Creative Writing at UEA in 1970. The UK's first PhD in Creative and Critical Writing followed in 1987.