London Creative Writing Program Turns Journey Into Inspiration

LONDON – After Petrina Danardatu graduated from Northeastern University’s Boston campus in 2025, she discovered herself being pulled in two reverse instructions. 

The twin journalism and English main already had desires of writing a novel, however was torn between investing time pursuing a profession in inventive writing or going again to Indonesia, the place her household is from, and touring with buddies.

Danardatu discovered a 3rd choice – the Northeastern London digital graduate diploma in inventive writing.  

“I was like: ‘I can do both of these things at once,’” mentioned Danardatu. “I can be traveling and having these new cultural experiences while also getting my master’s degree and developing my creative practice.” 

Danardatu is just not alone. In current many years, postgraduate inventive writing levels have established themselves as a key route right into a fiercely aggressive business, permitting would-be authors, poets and nonfiction writers to experiment in diversified types of self-expression with knowledgeable steerage.  

While the everyday author’s workshop brings teams of scholars collectively in a campus literary bubble, Northeastern London designed the totally on-line Contemporary Creative Writing program to “go to them,” defined Claire Griffiths, affiliate head of Creative Writing at Northeastern University London. Danardatu realized full-time over a yr, whereas others research part-time, however each tracks meet on-line, permitting real-world inspiration to strike on the similar time that writers hone their craft, she mentioned. 

Over the final two years, the possibility to review whereas island-hopping round Indonesia supplied inspiration for her dissertation undertaking, a novel set on the island of Bali, defined Danardatu. “Bali is such an artistic place – everyone there is some sort of craftsman. So I was just surrounded by art constantly and so much creativity,” she mentioned. With the steerage of lecturers similar to Griffiths, she has produced the opening chapters of a novel a couple of younger girl who’s an apprentice at her mom’s wood-carving studio, certainly one of many such ones on the Hindu-majority island.

“It’s a queer coming-of-age story as well about a girl who, in some ways, wants to carry on centuries of tradition, while also exploring this totally foreign territory and how to reconcile both those desires in her,” she mentioned. “I don’t think I would have been able to come up with that idea had I not been travelling around Bali myself and experiencing all of the art there.”

Inspiration flows in lots of instructions on the course, the place present college students arrive from the U.S., Europe, and the Middle East, explains Griffiths. 

Others in Danardatu’s cohort included Mike Marlowe, a journey and documentary photographer, who has spent many years touring via 25 nations on the African continent. That expertise serves as the muse for the work he’s getting ready for his forthcoming dissertation undertaking, the beginning of a inventive non-fiction guide, which he finally hopes to publish as “an episodic collection of stories and insights,” mentioned Marlowe. 

For Shari John, a London-based jazz singer and one other pupil within the inventive writing program, the sources of inspiration are extra complicated. She takes in her personal expertise in music together with self-initiated analysis into quantum physics, time, and the philosophical questions concerning the nature of consciousness, she shared. The on-line grasp’s has given the possibility to tug collectively all these elements – music, her personal expertise, and analysis – into one thing approaching a completed kind. “I love studying, I love researching,” she mentioned. “And trying to put my ideas, my explorations into a story form, I think that’s why I started doing creative writing in the first place.”

As a results of her time in this system, guided by her supervisor and assistant professor of English and Creative Writing Tomas Elliott, she has developed a novel-in-process that has parts of science fiction and realism, during which “a narrator finds herself in a space where time doesn’t behave in an ordinary way,” she mentioned. 

Danardatu and the others enrolled within the Contemporary Creative Writing program are gathering this week in London for the Northeastern University London Summer Writing Series 2026, which is providing this international cohort the possibility to fulfill – many for the primary time – and share tales, whereas taking the subsequent step of their profession. That will contain listening to from brokers and revealed authors about their path to success. 

As a member of the primary class to graduate from the Contemporary Creative Writing program on the London campus’ commencement ceremony, additionally held this week, Danardatu was grateful for a yr of combined real-world inspiration with the instructing that has allowed her first novel to take form. “Being able to achieve all of that at once was really, really special,” she mentioned.