Creative and critical writing postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

On the back of the depot's printed rota there is a column headed 'Remarks', and for two years I have watched drivers fill it with the most compressed prose I know: 'Mirror loose, nearside. Tell Gareth.' I work early shifts at a bus depot in Cardiff, cleaning vehicles and, more recently, helping the duty manager allocate cover. Reading those remarks every morning has sharpened a question I first met as an undergraduate: how much a short piece of writing can hold before it stops being a note and becomes something else. I want to pursue that question, through both my own writing and criticism, at postgraduate level.

I studied English Literature and Philosophy, graduating with a 2:1. My dissertation looked at Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red and Nox, asking how her use of fragment, scholarly footnote and lyric changes what counts as an argument. Nox, with its accordion-fold pages and its dictionary entries for a Catullus poem woven through an account of her brother's death, persuaded me that critical and creative attention need not be separate activities. My supervisor pushed me to stop describing Carson's forms admiringly and say precisely what each did. That discipline, asking what a structural choice achieves rather than whether it is striking, is the habit I most want to develop further.

Alongside the dissertation I wrote a sequence of short prose pieces about the lane behind my grandparents' house, each built around one object: a coal bunker, a cracked bird bath, a gate that would not latch. I submitted six of them as the creative component of a final-year option and received useful criticism that the later pieces leaned too heavily on nostalgia. Since graduating I have kept writing, mostly short essays that mix observation with reading, and I have started a longer piece about the depot itself: the noise of the wash bay at five in the morning, the drivers' shorthand, the strange intimacy of finding what passengers leave behind.

To keep myself writing regularly, I set up a fortnightly swap with four friends from my degree. We exchange up to two thousand words each and meet in a café or online to discuss them. I keep the timetable, chase people kindly, and draft a one-page response to each piece. Writing those responses has taught me how much easier it is to praise or condemn than to describe what a text is doing, and how often the most useful comment is a question.

My days have a fixed shape. After my shift I collect my younger brother, who is thirteen, from school three afternoons a week while my mother works, and I help with his homework before writing in the evening. This has made me efficient with time and realistic about what sustained work requires. It has also made me a slower, more patient explainer; he has little interest in poems, but he will argue about the endings of films for an hour.

Not everything I do feeds my writing directly. I birdwatch on the Taff and at Cardiff Bay, and keep a notebook of sightings, mostly cormorants, grey herons and, once, a kingfisher. I enjoy it for its own sake, though I notice that the habit of recording exactly what I saw, rather than what I expected, is close to the habit good prose needs.

I am applying for postgraduate study because I want structured time, rigorous feedback and serious reading to move my work from promising fragments towards a coherent body of writing. I want to read more widely in hybrid and essayistic forms, write criticism that is attentive to how texts are built, and test my own pieces against readers who will not be gentle. I bring steady habits, practice in giving and receiving criticism, and a working life that has given me plenty to write about.