Spectator competition winners: The polar bear who came to tea

In Competition No. 3242, you were asked to submit a short story that is a mash-up of cli-fi with a genre of your choice.

In his 2016 book The Great Derangement, the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh questioned why ‘climate change cast a much smaller shadow on literature than it does on the world’. Six years on, though, cli-fi, like the thermometer, is inexorably on the rise and you were invited to jump on the bandwagon.

I was taken with J.C.H. Mounsey’s Conan Doyle-inflected ‘The Swedish Cassandra’, and with Joe Houlihan’s poignant tale of Pooh and friends in the Hundred Acre Desert: ‘We need honey. Piglet, did you bring the honey jar?… Piglet shuffled his little feet. “All the bees are dead,” he said.’

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A commendation also goes to Brian Murdoch, who just missed out on a spot in the winning line-up.