Prospects Postgrad 1

ARTS AND HUMANITIES Postgrad 59 The writers’ room LEONORA KLEIN read English at University College London before ‘vocational’ course. I was always aware that I was in a department where important critical and scholarly work was going on around me. WORDS OF WISDOM My tutors had the insight and training to become a barrister. After ten years in court, however, she decided to return to her first passion and signed up for an MA in Life Writing at the University of East Anglia (UEA). She explains why she swapped the High Court for the literary highway. Ten years’ work in the family courts was enough. The pressure of dealing with child abduction, child abuse and tetchy High Court judges made it impossible to give enough time and energy to my own young children. Time passed and I realised that what I really wanted was to return to my first passion, not to the corridors of the High Court. I wanted to write and I knew that I needed structure and support and a lot of inspiration to be able to begin. I applied to the Life Writing MA at UEA because the tutors were leading practitioners in the world of biography and the course itself was run within one of the top English Literature departments in the country. The MA was relatively new when I applied, but it already had a fearsomely good reputation. THE COMMITMENTS The application process was depth of understanding that only comes with many years of experience in the field. They inspired us and they also gave us invaluable advice and encouragement as fellow writers. I started to write in the first week, having never written before. I was always supported by my tutors, and never patronised. I was regularly criticised, otherwise there would have been no point in being there, but the criticism was always constructive and the support was always forthcoming. Towards the end of the year, as the deadline loomed for the final 15,000 word dissertation, the tutors were extraordinarily generous with their time, going far beyond the call of duty to make sure that all of us were going to submit a piece of work that we felt really proud of. My fellow students had all chosen the ER doctor in Oxford, leaving the seminars to drive halfway across England and start a night shift. The course itself exceeded all my expectations and taught me far more than Its great achievement was to combine the practical and the academic. I learnt the nuts and bolts of biographical writing, the practicalities of research, the strange rules of the archive, and the pitfalls of copyright law. At the same time I studied the history of biography, and I learnt to read properly, to really pay attention to the text. I was introduced to literary agents but it was always clear that this was not simply a course because they wanted to write biography rather than fiction, and I think this gave the programme a very clear sense of identity and purpose. The age range of the students was wide – from twenty something to sixty something – and the range of biographical subjects was equally wide, going far beyond the literary biographies that I had expected to find. England football manager Alf Ramsey rubbed shoulders with Emily Wilding Davison, the suffragette who threw herself under a horse at The Derby. Peggy Guggenheim sat alongside Sir Astley Cooper, the eminent nineteenth century surgeon. tough, but not unreasonably so, and the practicalities of combining postgraduate less daunting than I had imagined. I was living in London; for part of the year I commuted and some of the time I spent a couple of nights a week in Norwich. The seminars were timetabled very thoughtfully so that those of us on the course who were travelling, or working, or sometimes both, could juggle commitments successfully. One of my fellow students heroically combined the course with his job as an study with family life turned out to be much I had imagined possible in just one year. PIERREPOINT AND PUBLISHING My own subject was far from literary: Albert Pierrepoint, one of the last English hangmen, who witnessed the gradual demise of capital punishment in England in the nineteen fifties. As a barrister I was fascinated by the way in which Pierrepoint was caught up in the legal and political tensions of post-war Britain and how he became a liability for his political masters. The support and friendship of my peers was a vital and incredibly productive part of this programme. We shared ideas and problems and forged friendships that have gone far beyond the confines of the course. We are all part of a writing community that has grown in the intervening years and continues to grow. Four months after the end of the programme I was commissioned to write a book that developed the subject of my dissertation. It was published in 2006 and I am now writing my second book.

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Prospects Postgrad Autumn 2008 Contents: What’s Inside For Love and Money Cash for Qualifications A Tale of Two Students Meet the Postgrad People All Aboard The Postgraduate Environment Maths Market The Postgrad Programme Teacher Training Arts and Humanities Science and Engineering Business and Management Social Sciences

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