Claire Adam

"The MA in Creative & Life Writing at Goldsmiths was a huge turning point for me. I'd been writing on my own for ages, and I'd managed to produce two novels, but I knew they weren't very good and I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong. I'd been reluctant to enrol in a Creative Writing course, because I worried that a teacher would walk into the classroom and start instructing us on "rules" of creative writing, but luckily the Goldsmiths MA isn't like that!

There are all the usual components of a Creative Writing MA, I suppose – workshops, reading, essays, one-to-one sessions with tutors, guest lectures, opportunities to meet published authors, literary agents, etc – but what I liked about the Goldsmiths MA was the space, and freedom, and the respect with which the tutors treated our work. It was a good year, a year of figuring my writing out. I started work on Golden Child while I was at Goldsmiths, and it's just been awarded the 2019 Desmond Elliott Prize for best debut novel."