Spectator competition winners: short stories narrated from an unusual perspective

In Competition No. 3282, you were invited to submit a short story narrated from an un-usual perspective.

The seed for this challenge was Kim Stanley-Robinson’s cli-fi novel Ministry For the Future, described by the New Yorker as ‘both harrowing and heartening’. One of its chapters is narrated by a carbon atom, another by the market; a literary device informed by Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory (the idea that non-human entities have agency).

Honourable mentions go to Bob Pringle, Joe Bogle, Martin Leigh, C-A Herstedt and Frank Upton. The winners, printed below, are awarded £25 each.

When first I began to clear, Haggie realised he was – somehow – still alive. Very little else was, so it seemed. The landscape was upended, stripped, preposterous: decorated with stifling puddles, split duckboards, and the usual human detritus, over which I am sometimes draped by the artistic.

Haggie patted himself down, hunting through his uniform for injuries, or perhaps for one of his infernal cigarettes.