‘I don't at all favour the institution known as the “creative writer on the campus”,’ opined F. R. Leavis in 1967. ‘What next?’ linguist Roman Jakobson remarked, when he heard Vladimir Nabokov had been offered a Harvard professorship, ‘shall we appoint an elephant to teach zoology?’ Like King Cnut, their helplessly raised hands failed to hold back the tide. Creative writing (hereafter CW) maintains an uneasy relationship with its academic mother subject, English, ‘rather like welcoming Heathcliff into the family’, in Nicholas Royle's British ‘elephant’ equivalent. Beyond this uncomfortable duality as academic sub-discipline and object of study, however, Royle recognizes that CW attracts students, connecting its rapid expansion in many minds to the marketization of Higher Education.

A success story, yet often eyed still with suspicion then, CW has gradually carved out a distinct academic identity for itself. This essay outlines the subject's genesis within English Studies, and describes the ways it has come to describe its own research paradigms. It considers how the subject is currently securing its future in Higher Education. We discuss how the University of Leicester's CW research centre, the Centre for New Writing, has adapted to the wider academic research environment. Notwithstanding the subject's business value to institutional managers, we show how it provides many opportunities, both to serve the wider writing community, and to design innovative research projects with colleagues from other disciplines. Archaeologists, archivists, historians, geographers and medical researchers are awakening to the power of imaginative writing and beginning to understand its potential for delivering considerable public benefits.

Understanding ‘Creative Practice’

Sociologist Laurel Richardson ‘was taught … not to write until I knew what I wanted to say’; instead, she finds ‘I write in order to learn something that I did not know before I wrote it.’ The late author and screenwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet believed the