Recent graduate Frank Burton was featured on Radio 4, which broadcast his short story The World, read by Emmerdale star Karl Davies. The World is about a man who wakes up one day to discover he can see and hear everything that is happening in the world.

Meanwhile, current MA student Juliet West has notched a double whammy in a competition organised by The New Writer, receiving confirmation that a poem and a short story were highly commended. Both will be published in a future edition.

The poem, One In The Oven, came from a writing exercise set by Juliet's tutor, Alison MacLeod, during the metaphor and the imagination module.

The short story, Baby Alan, was from a writing exercise led by Alison's colleague Stephen Mollett during the sources and transformations module.

Juliet made it a hat-trick of success by going on to win first prize in the West Sussex section of the Slipstream Poets' annual competition. Her poem The Churchyard At Heptonstall was written after a poetry workshop run by Stephanie Norgate, who co-ordinates the University's MA programme.

"I'm still struggling to believe I've won a poetry competition," said Juliet, a former journalist. "Although I've always enjoyed reading poetry, I didn't see myself as someone who could write a real poem.

"But thanks to the encouragement of the tutors on the creative writing MA – especially a series of poetry workshops led by Stephanie Norgate – I felt brave enough to experiment in this genre."

Juliet's classmate David Hailwood is celebrating a different kind of publishing success. He is the author of the new one-page comic strip Hoaxers which appears in Toxic comic, issue 137.

There is an opportunity for readers to vote online for their favourite comic strip in the comic. And the strip with the most votes might go on to get a regular series.

Finally, Issie Croucher (pen name Isabel Ashdown) has secured a literary agent for her novel Glasshopper, which she started writing while studying as an undergraduate in the English department.

The book has been accepted by an agency based in Brighton, which will now search for a publisher in London.