Spectator competition winners: poems to mark the centenary of the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb

In Competition No. 3277, you were invited to supply a poem to mark the 100th anniversary of the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb. Fifty years ago, amid a wave of Tut mania, some 1.6 million people queued up to see the boy king at the British Museum. Nick MacKinnon and his mum were among them and he earns a commendation for his account of their outing. In a diverse, clever and technically accomplished entry, Roger Rengold, A.H. Harker, Michael Jameson, Paul A. Freeman, Donald Mack and Robin Hill also shone, but the prizes go to the seven printed below, whose authors snaffle £20 each.

Three thousand years of strangers own his bones
And traffic in the trappings of his reign –
From mummy mask of gold and precious stones
To canes that helped him limp with bent-foot pain.
Though robbed a wee bit in antiquity,
His tomb stayed untouched to a great extent
Till Europe’s Great War was a memory
And foreign scholarship could pitch its tent.