To find out more details about the transfer to The Open University see A New Chapter for OCA.
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Last month, the phenomenon of cyber bullying became headline news when Conservative MP Louise Mensch spoke out against the onslaught of misogynistic abuse to which she had been subjected on the micro-blogging site Twitter. Mensch is a member of the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee. The comments, many of them explicit and most of […]
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Uccello’s painting of George and the dragon appears to depict a male hero coming to the rescue of a maiden in distress. But does the composition of the painting belie this reading? Is the maiden taming the dragon successfully herself, without the need for St George to intervene? Writers including the poet Ursula Fanshawe and novelist Oscar Wilde and Margaret Forster have used an actual or imagined painting as the basis for their work.
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Writers seeking a sense of historical authenticity in their work have to consider both style and content. At the height of the popularity of historical fiction after the Second World War, writers such as Josephine Tey and Anya Seton, combined narrative dialogue and period detail in a manner which by the 1960s had fallen out of fashion. Peter Ackroyd and Hilary Mantel, two contemporary writers whose work aims to recreate a sense of time and place, aim to achieve this in rather different ways.
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At the beginning of March 2012, 15 OCA creative writing students spent six days at The Arvon Foundation’s Lumb Bank in West Yorkshire, the former home of poet Ted Hughes. There, they found the time, space and inspiration to write. Arvon and OCA are both keen to continue their partnership so that OCA students can combine the ongoing structure of open learning with the intense experience of a residential writing retreat.
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The essay has evolved since its beginning in France and England more than 400 years ago from a pithy work of flawless logic to a prose form adopted by schools, think tanks and broadcasters, as well as by writers categorised as essayists. It’s time for the essay to reassert itself and for essayists to help readers understand what this misunderstood form capable of.
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OCA has broken with convention by appointing a religious studies scholar as its new curriculum lead for creative writing. Northern Irish essayist and poet Chris Arthur has a background in religious studies, first as an undergraduate and postgraduate at Edinburgh University and subsequently at Lampeter University, where he taught for more than 20 years. Fellow Irish writer Patrick O’Sullivan has credited him with ‘rescuing the meditative essay for the twenty-first century’.
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It’s not always the case that writers have to produce draft after draft of a short story, as OCA creative writing student Guy Barriscale found when he wrote his prize-winning story ‘Jamesy’ in just one sitting. Prompted by an incident in this childhood, the story came to him fully formed when he saw an old man pushing his bicycle up a hill in a rural part of County Leitrim, with additional ideas for the life of gthe central character being inspired by his speculations about the lives of three farmer brothers. Commended in the Seán Ó Faoláin competition in 2011, the story was published in the Munster Festival’s ‘Southword’ at the beginning of 2012.
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The Royal Society of Literature (RSL) has just announced that submissions for the thirteenth V.S. Pritchett Memorial Prize are now open. There is a prize of £1,000, and the winning entry will be published in Prospect and the RSL Review. In addition to this, there will be an opportunity to appear at an RSL event […]
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Last week’s Wikipedia blackout and journalist Johann Hari’s decision not to return to ‘The Independent’ put plagiarism in the news. But plagiarism, imitation, forgery, flattery, call it what you will, the discipline of writing in the voice of another writer is a good way to find your own voice.
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OCA creative writing tutors pick their literary highlights for 2011, reflecting on what the writers they choose have to teach students of creative writing. The range is wide: this year’s Man Booker winner, performance poetry in Wales, short fiction, the Poet Laureate’s new collection, poems from the Outback….
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