Dr Alison Taft joins Leeds Beckett as English and Creative Writing Course Director

I did my degree at Leeds Beckett, back in the days when there were no tuition fees and maintenance grants [money towards your living costs] were still a thing. In my first year of university, my rent was £18.50 a week and £6.25 of it was covered by Housing Benefit.

Sounds too good to be true now, but there were downsides to studying back then. Creative writing degrees barely existed and answering the Careers’ Teacher’s ‘What do you want to be?’ question with the words, ‘A writer’ would have probably got me detention. In those days, writing wasn’t seen as a career, at least not for young women from Burnley.

So, I did a degree in something else. Something that would lead to a conventional job.  Although I loved life in Leeds, I didn’t particularly engage with my studies, but I did enough to graduate and get my ‘sensible’ job. I worked for a few years, but my dream of being a writer never went away.

Of course, the trouble with a degree that isn’t creative writing, is you don’t learn how to write.  I tried not to let that put me off – I attended community classes and wrote a lot. I even had some success - three of my novels were published by an independent press. But after years of trying to get my work in front of bigger publishers, I knew I needed expert help.

So, I signed up for an MA in Creative Writing. Thanks to the invaluable feedback and support of my tutors, most of whom were published writers, the novel I started on the course was eventually published as The Disappeared (under my writing name of Ali Harper) by HarperCollins. My latest, The Runaway, came out in 2019.

Looking back, I wish I’d nailed my colours to the mast and done my degree in creative writing. I wish I’d known then that writers can be writers AND have rewarding careers.

There’s a generally-accepted wisdom that it takes ten years to write to the stage of getting published. And a well-respected literary agent once told me I’d need ten novels in print to make a full-time living as a writer. But even if I get that far, I don’t believe writers should be shut away in ivory towers – writers need to work, they need inspiration, source material and a sense of community.

That’s why on our creative writing degree you will learn how to write to the absolute edges of your talent AND how to balance a working life with a creative life. Our modules are designed to prepare you for a career that includes and sustains writing.

Communication skills top the charts for employers when it comes to recruitment. Language is our country’s biggest export. Creative writing students are the masters of language. The recent pandemic taught us that the world needs stories more than ever, but also that it needs imaginative thinkers, creative solution-makers and skilled communicators. Creative writing students are all of those and more.