In Competition No. 3321 you were invited to provide a love scene from a novel set in a location that might not be considered conducive to romance. There was a distinctly scatological flavour to this week’s postbag. Rubbing shoulders with the abattoirs and morgues were sewage treatment plants and waste-contaminated waters. Adrian Fry’s description of
In Competition No. 3320 you were invited to submit a poem extolling Epicureanism over Stoicism or the other way round. Stoicism is enjoying something of a revival, embraced by everyone from billionaire tech bros to self-help devotees. But Mary Beard is no fan of Marcus Aurelius and has said that she finds it ‘mystifying’ that
In Competition No. 3319 you were invited to supply a description of the house of a well-known figure from the field of fact or fiction that provides clues to their personality. This assignment was prompted by Laura Freeman’s reference in a Spectator articleto ‘Great Men’s Houses’, an essay Virginia Woolf wrote for Good Housekeeping in
In Competition No. 3318 you were invited to provide a verse portrait of Seamus Heaney by any other poet, living or dead. This challenge marks the tenth anniversary, last month, of Heaney’s death. Once asked if anything in his work struck him as appropriate as an epitaph, the Nobel Laureate quoted from his translation of
In Competition No. 3317 you were invited to provide an opening to a novel that bears out Elmore Leonard’s tip to writers: ‘Never open a book with weather.’ Leonard’s other bêtes noires, outlined in his 2007 10 Rules of Writing, include prologues, exclamation marks and the modification of the word ‘said’ with an adverb. But
In Competition No. 3316, you were invited to recast Rishi Sunak’s five pledges in verse form. The tone this week was one of acerbic mischief. A nod to Ann Drysdale, who earns a commendation, and to Elizabeth Bishop, John Masefield and W.S. Gilbert, to whom entries below owe a debt. Prizes of £30 land in
In Competition No. 3315, you were invited to invent a legend that explains the origin and nature of a flower other than a sunflower or narcissus, whose well-known origin story tells of Narcissus, the beautiful youth who draws the vengeance of the gods, falls in love with his own reflection in the waters of a
In Competition No. 3314, you were invited to submit clerihews (two couplets, AABB, metrically clunky, humorous in tone) on well-known philosophers. Eric Idle’s ‘Bruces’ Philosophers Song’ cast a long shadow over a large and jolly postbag. ‘Extraordinarily hard to avoid couplets from the Monty Python song!’ wrote A.H. Harker in a note accompanying his entry.Brian
In Competition No. 3313, you were invited to supply a poem about the worms that were resurrected by scientists after being frozen in the Siberian permafrost for 46,000 years. The tiny roundworms, buried deep underground since the late Pleistocene, were brought back to life by being immersed in water and transported to Germany – in
In Competition No. 3312, you were invited to supply a contribution to a book of recipes invented by fictional characters, entries being for the Carrollean, Dickensian or Shakespearean sections. Commendations to Martyn Hurst and Jon Robins, both of whom provided Uriah Heep’s recipe for humble pie, and to Mike Morrison’s Hamlet (‘Sous-vide or not sous-vide,
In Competition No. 3311, you were invited to submit a song suitable for inclusion in a parliamentary songbook. In an entry in which most scored pleasingly high on singability, W.S. Gilbert rubbed shoulders with Simon & Garfunkel and the Kinks. An honourable mention to Emily Matthews, but leading the winners below, who take £30 each,
In Competition No. 3310, you were invited to submit a horror story on the theme of artificial intelligence. None of your entries, creditable though they were, matched the horror of Harlan Ellison’s gruesome short story from 1967, ‘I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream’, which was at the back of my mind when I set
In Competition No. 3309, you were invited to compose a poem starting with the last line of any well-known poem and ending with its first, the new poem being on a different subject from the original. Max Ross’s sonnet, reflecting on the demands of the task in hand, earns a commendation: The task for which
In Competition No. 3208 you were invited to submit a short story whose first or last line is: ‘“Is there anybody there?” said the Traveller.’ The given line opens Walter de la Mare’s slippery, haunting, much-anthologised ‘The Listeners’ and many entries echoed the 1912 poem’s supernatural theme. An honourable mention to George Simmers and David
In Competition No. 3207 you were invited to submit a verse obituary of Silvio Berlusconi. The Italian former prime minister who, despite sex scandals and court battles, managed three stints as PM, died last month aged 86. His more startling gaffes included suggesting that Abruzzo earthquake survivors see their situation as ‘a weekend of camping’
In Competition No. 3306, you were invited to submit a poem about procrastination. Procrastination looms large in Out of Sheer Rage, Geoff Dyer’s hilarious account of his attempt to write a study of D.H. Lawrence, and it struck me as an excellent topic for a competition. As Samuel Johnson wrote, the tendency to put things
In Competition No. 3305, you were invited to submit a sonnet entitled ‘Sonnet On Famous And Familiar Sonnets’. The germ for this challenge was ‘Sonnet On Famous And Familiar Sonnets And Experiences’ by the gifted, troubled Delmore Schwartz, friend to Robert Lowell and John Berryman (who wrote a suite of poems in memory of him).
In Competition No. 3304, you were invited to submit Shakespeare’s reflections on a pressing issue of your choice. In BBC Radio Four’s Taking Issue With Shakespeare, which prompted this task, Michael Gove discusses levelling up with reference to King Lear, Will Self reflects on toxic masculinity in Hamlet, and Gordon Brown draws parallels between a
In Competition No. 3303, you were invited to submit an explanation of the facts of life by a person from the field of fact or fiction who might be deemed a surprising choice. A commendation to A.R. Duncan-Jones, whose lesson harnessed the reverse chronology of Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow: ‘Every ejaculation is premature. Well, it
In Competition No. 3302, you were invited to compose a dating app profile for a writer of your choice. To mark the centenary last year of Philip Larkin’s birth, the poet Imtiaz Dharker wrote ‘Swiping left on Larkin’ in which she imagined how, given his complicated relationship with intimacy, the poet would present himself on
