Beginners’ Workshop Group
Join a supportive community for close reading and developmental feedback on your new poems!
*This course is currently only open to priority students who attended in Autumn 2025.*
If you are a new student who did not attend this course last term, please email our team at [email protected] and we will contact you after the priority booking period is over on 20 November to let you know if there are any available spaces.
* This course will take place on the video-conferencing platform ZOOM *
This is a workshop group for new poets who want to write together and share their work in a safe space and receive gentle, constructive feedback from an experienced, published, prize-winning tutor and from their fellow writers. These workshops will focus on free-writing in response to brief single-poem prompts, followed by any poems the group wishes to share, focussed on building community and mutual support. You will need to be interested in sharing your writing, but you do not need to be an experienced writer – this is a group aimed at poets who wish to build their confidence in a friendly and supportive environment, including total beginners who may never have written or shared a poem before. This workshop group is run in partnership with our course, Poetic Forms for Beginners.
5 fortnightly Zoom sessions on Wednesdays, 7–9pm (BST), starts 28 January 2026.
Concessions & Accessibility
To apply for a concession rate, please send relevant documentation showing your eligibility for one of our concessions to [email protected]. Conditions of eligibility are detailed here. If you have any questions or wish to be added to the waiting list of a sold-out course, please email [email protected].
What to Expect
Please check the left hand side of this page for information on how this course works in practice, under the heading ‘Course Style‘. If you’re unsure as to what any of the terms there mean, or if this course is a good fit for you, then please take a look at our What to Expect page which includes some further information on how our courses function.
Image credit: @didsss
About Becky Varley-Winter 
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Becky Varley-Winter’s first full-length poetry collection, Dangerous Enough, was published by Salt in 2023. She has also published a poetry pamphlet, Heroines: On the Blue Peninsula (V. Press, 2019), was longlisted in the National Poetry Competition 2019, won the T. R. Henn and Brewer-Hall Prizes, and appeared in Poetry Review, Magma, Rising, Finished Creatures, and Tentacular, amongst others. Her other publications are a book on modernist poetry and literary fragments, Reading Fragments and Fragmentation in Modernist Literature (Sussex Academic Press, 2018), and a collection of short fiction, BLOOM (Broken Sleep Books, 2021).
"The beginners' workshop group was a really great introduction to sharing work, getting feedback, listening to work and giving feedback. Rebecca created a really welcoming and generous space."
Poetic Forms for Beginners
Friday Workshop with Natasha Hakimi Zapata
Pathways through Poetry: Module 1