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Barriers To Creative Writing Among University Students In Qatar, Sam Meekings Dr, Lujain Assaf, Gwiza Gwiza, Tayyibah Kazim, Laiba Mubashar

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

Matthew Salesses (2021) asks ‘How can we rethink craft, and the teaching of it, to better reach writers with diverse backgrounds? How can we invite diverse storytelling traditions into literary spaces?’ This paper applies these questions to students in the Arab Gulf, by presenting and analysing the results of a research project investigating the barriers (culturally, locally, and in terms of colonial conceptions of craft) that impede student creative writers in Qatar. Aided by a Provost Grant from Northwestern University, we carried out interviews among students from a range of universities in Qatar in order to catalogue local writing habits, …