With Nick Hunt, author of Red Smoking Mirror, Outlandish and Where the Wild Winds Are
This course is an introduction to writing imaginative and speculative fiction – from sci-fi and fantasy to alternate history. You will learn techniques for world-building and peopling different realities; imagining utopias, dystopias and possible futures; how to write strong characters and structure your storyline; and how to make the worlds you create vivid and alive.
Following in the footsteps of writers like Ursula K. Le Guin and Margaret Atwood, we will examine how speculative writing plays a deeply subversive role, destabilising ‘the way things are’ and allowing our imagination to break free of its bindings. Imagining different pasts, and futures, enables different presents.
The course will combine teaching and reading – with inspirations ranging from China Miéville, Adrian Tchaikovsky and Octavia E. Butler to Alan Garner and William Golding – with writing exercises, group discussions, feedback and structured writing time. By the end of the six weeks, you will have completed a solid beginning to a new story, or deepened and expanded a work already in progress. Whether you are a published author or a curious beginner, all you need is something to write on and your imagination.
Nick Hunt is the author of Red Smoking Mirror (Swift Press, 2021), an alternate history set in 16th-century Mexico, which was a finalist for the Edward Stanford Viking Award for Fiction with a Sense of Place. His non-fiction books include Outlandish, Where the Wild Winds Are and Walking the Woods and the Water.
He has taught writing courses at the Arvon Foundation, the University of Bristol, Schumacher College and other institutions. He also works as an editor and a writing mentor. In September 2025 he will start a two-year placement as a Royal Literary Fellow at the University of Bristol.
