Hanif: writing courses are mental hospitals

Hanif Kureishi (pictured), the novelist and screenwriter, has launched a withering attack on university creative writing courses during a talk at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival. Kureishi, himself a research associate on the creative writing course at Kingston University in London, said: "One of the things you notice is that when you switch on the television and a student has gone mad with a machine gun on a campus in America, it's always a writing student. The writing courses, particularly when they have the word 'creative' in them, are the new mental hospitals."

Kureishi - whose work includes My Beautiful Laundrette, The Buddha of Suburbia and The Black Album - also challenged the benefits of such courses. He said of his students, "When I teach them, they are always better at the end - and more unhappy." He added that creative writing courses set up false expectations among students that literary fame will inevitably follow, as it did for Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro, who both attended the creative writing course at the University of East Anglia. "The fantasy is that all the students will become successful writers - and no one will disabuse them of that."

Past and future students of Kureishi's will doubtless be upset to learn of his approach to grading. "I always give people the same mark – 71 per cent... I always say they were well-behaved, well-dressed. Then they write me these nice letters saying, 'I never expected I would get so much.' But how can you mark creative writing?"