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King's Creative Writing graduates on the bookshelves: discover their work

21 February 2025

Arts & Culture

The PhD in Creative Writing at King’s was established in 2019 for students who are aiming to complete a book-length creative work for publication and sustain a long-term career in writing. Since its launch, graduates from the programme have gone on to publish novels, poetry collections and creative non-fiction projects – get to know their work.

Dr Peter Pomerantsev's book How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler, supervised as a creative non-fiction project by Jon Day between 2020-2023, was published by Faber in 2024.

The book follows the true story of Sefton Delmer, a complex and largely forgotten WWII propagandist, asking what we can learn from him in today's age of disinformation.

Published in March 2025 by Chatto & Windus, MINX by Dr Karen Downs-Barton is a poetry collection evoking a childhood on the edge of society, drawing on the vibrant but precarious world of a multi-racial Romani family. The collection captures how it feels to grow up between a culture whose traditional ways are being lost and a wider society that despises them.

Dr Sarah Howe supervised this work as a poetry project between 2020-2023.

Dr Scott Preston's novel The Borrowed Hills was published by John Murray Press in the UK and by Scribner in the USA in 2024. The novel was supervised as a fiction project by Benjamin Wood between 2020-2023. Scott was the first graduate of the Creative Writing programme at King's.

The Borrowed Hills is set in 2001 amidst the outbreak of foot and mouth disease in Cumbria, re-imagining the American Western in the fells of northern England.

Dr Nick Makoha's poetry collection The New Carthaginians was published by Penguin Press in February 2025. The work stems from a hijacked plane lands at Entebbe International Airport in 1976, triggering the crisis that leads to Uganda becoming a pariah state and later to the young Makoha’s escape from the country.

The New Carthaginians was supervised as a poetry project by Dr Sarah Howe between 2019-2023.

Still to come is Court Green by Dr Helen Bain, a revisiting of Sylvia Plath's life in North Devon between 1961-1962. This work was supervised as a fiction project by Benjamin Wood between 2020-2024, and will be published by Bloomsbury in the UK and by Scribner in the USA in 2026. This work was supervised as a fiction project by Benjamin Wood between 2020-2024.