Spectator competition winners: first and last lines of novels seen in a new light

In Competition No. 3284, you were invited to supply a topical short story that begins with the last line of a well-known novel and ends with the first.

Much has been written about the rise of AI bot ChatGPT (from zero users to several million its first two weeks!), and reader Alistair Kelman fed it the last and first lines of Nineteen Eighty-Four to see how it would fare with this challenge. There’s no room to share the result, alas, but I can say that while it won’t be winning any prizes for now, the bot’s performance was a marked improvement on that of a predecessor, GPT-2, set the same task a few years ago. So watch this space.

Brian Murdoch described this as ‘an interestingly difficult assignment’ which was evidently a good thing judging by the mammoth entry. The best five earn £30, and commiserations go to worthy runners-up Gopali Mulji, Susan McReynolds, Chris Ramsey, David Taylor, Sue Pickard, J.C.H. Mounsey, Verity Kalcev and Bill Thomas.

The scar had not pained Harry for 19 years. All was well.

Or almost all. The North Pole frostnip episode now merely an amusing anecdote, Harry could focus on the slow healing of other wounds. Such as the rift between himself and his family. While jogging during a late-night break in the California rain, his thoughts turned to his recent memoir, which he hoped would finally succeed where frank interviews and even a Netflix documentary had failed. His gaze settled on a random star in the briefly cloud-free sky, and on an impulse he took the opportunity to wish once more that his father and brother would now come to comprehend him. To really get him.

The two men appeared out of nowhere, a few yards apart in the narrow, moonlit lane.

Julie Steiner/Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows