In Competition No. 2607 you were invited to submit a piece of verbless prose (present participles used as adjectives or nouns were permissible).
‘Invaders, dictators, usurpers of our literature,’ boomed the French writer Michel Thaler in the preface to his verb-free novel Le train de nulle part, published in 2004. His hatred of the doing word was such that he organised a symbolic, and well-attended, burial ceremony for it at the Sorbonne. There was a revolutionary mood in the ranks this week, with mutterings in the entry about the pointlessness of this kind of challenge. But it did produce a lively and varied postbag that was a pleasure to judge. On particularly cracking form were David Silverman, Esdon Frost and Seree Zohar. They were narrowly beaten by the winners, printed below, who get £30 each. Celeste Francis get the bonus fiver.
‘Something of a bloodbath here, Sergeant Greenwell.
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