In Competition No. 3047 you were invited to supply an imaginary testimonial for a high-profile figure that is superficially positive but contains hidden warnings to a potential employer. This was an exercise in the artful deployment of ambiguity, as displayed in Robert J. Thornton’s L.I.A.R. The Lexicon of Intentionally Ambiguous Recommendations, a handbook for
In Competition No. 3046 you were invited to supply a poem beginning with the last line of any well-known poem and ending with its first line, the new poem being on a different subject all together. This was a wildly popular comp, which elicited a witty and wide-ranging entry that was both pleasurable and
In Competition No. 3045 you were invited to provide a poem about euphemisms. You avoided politics and sex (mostly), preferring instead to focus on the language of dying and the words and expressions that enable us to sidestep the D-word (according to David Crystal, there are more than 1,000 words for death categorised in
In Competition No. 3044 you were invited to provide a lesson in the facts of life courtesy of a well-known character in fiction. There is space only for me to commend Jayne Osborn, who recruited Dr Seuss: ‘Doing sex is good fun, and it’s easy to do./ Let me demonstrate, using Thing One and
In Competition No. 3043 you were invited to provide a short story inspired by the Salisbury poisonings. Ian McEwan, a writer who is fascinated by spying, was asked recently on the Today programme how he would begin a novel inspired by the current confrontation with Russia. The image that comes to mind, he said,
In Competition No. 3042, a challenge inspired by the American parodist Frank Jacobs’s 1975 version of ‘Jabberwocky’, ‘As If Lewis Carroll Were a Hollywood Press Agent in the Thirties’, you were invited to provide a Hollywood–themed ‘Jabberwocky’ for our times. Jacobs begins: ‘’Twas Bogart and the Franchot Tones/ Did Greer and Garson in the Wayne;/
In Competition No. 3041, to mark the centenary of the birth of Muriel Spark, you were invited to submit a poem with the title ‘The Ballad of [insert place name here]. I admired Paul Carpenter’s nod to Ken Dodd (‘The Ballad of Knotty Ash’) and David Silverman’s caustic, comic ‘Ballad of Westgate Shopping Centre’,
In Competition No. 3040 you were invited to submit a poem against poets or poetry. Plato started it, but over the ages poetry has been accused of many sins: elitism, aestheticising horror, inadequacy as an agency of political change. In what was a wide-ranging and spirited entry there were references to Shelley (‘poets are
In Competition No. 3039, which was inspired by Elizabeth Gilbert’s phenomenally successful memoir Eat, Pray, Love, you were invited to choose a well-known figure, past or present, invent a three-verb title you felt would be appropriate for their memoir, and provide an extract from it. Some promising-sounding titles — Sleep, Dream, Fleece by Sigmund Freud,
In Competition No. 3038 you were invited to provide a (longer) sequel to the six-word story ‘For sale: baby shoes, never worn’. Long before Twitter, so legend has it, Ernest Hemingway crafted this mini masterpiece in response to a bet that he couldn’t write a novel in half a dozen words. This turns out
In Competition No. 3037 you were invited to take a song by Abba or the Beatles and rewrite the lyrics as a sonnet. Oh, for more space. Your entries were especially clever and funny this week, and the winners were chosen only after protracted agonising. Those printed below take £20 each. O Jude! Fear
In Competition No. 3036 you were invited to provide a resignation letter in the style of a well-known author. I was inspired to set this challenge by the great William Faulkner, who bowed out with panache from his job as University of Mississippi postmaster: ‘I will be damned if I propose to be at the
In Competition No. 3035 you were invited to provide a poem entitled ‘The Love Song of [insert name of a well-known figure]’. There was no obligation to write in the style of Eliot, but a few brave souls did so. David Shields’s ‘Love Song of Kim Kardashian’ (‘I have measured out my life in selfie
In Competition No. 3034 you were invited to provide a poem written by a poet laureate present or past on the engagement of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. There are those who view the role of laureate as a poisoned chalice. Craig Raine has described how he said to Ted Hughes, during a discussion
In Competition No. 3033 you were invited to take as your first line ‘I am the very model of a Very Stable Genius’ and continue for up to a further 15. It seemed about time for a challenge to mark Trump’s first year in office, and what better as a springboard than the Donald’s
In Competition No. 3032 you were invited to provide a poem about passports. While the news that British passports issued after October of next year would be navy blue rather than burgundy was heartily cheered in some quarters, others — like Nicola Sturgeon, who denounced it as ‘insular nonsense’ — weren’t so delighted. And
In Competition No. 3031 you were invited to provide a review by a restaurant critic that is tediously loaded with sexual language. I have had this comp up my sleeve since reading a piece by Steven Poole in the Observer in which he laid into the relentless sexualisation of food in our culture: ‘Everyone
In Competition No. 3030 you were invited to provide a poem entitled ‘January’. I mentioned William Carlos Williams, R.S. Thomas and Dante Gabriel Rossetti in the brief for this challenge, all of whom wrote poems with ‘January’ as their title. But that most maligned of months also lands a starring role in the opening
In Competition No. 3029 you were invited to provide a new year’s resolution (or more than one) in verse. Woody Guthrie’s 1943 ‘new years rulin’s’ have considerable charm: ‘Dont get lonesome; stay glad; dream good; shine shoes; wash teeth if any…’ But perhaps it was Nietzsche who inspired Basil Ransome-Davies’s entry. In 1882, he
In Competition No. 3028 you were invited to submit lines for a Christmas card courtesy of well-known poets. Poets moved to write Yule-inspired verse include that old killjoy William Topaz Mc-Gonagall: ‘The way to respect Christmas time/ Is not by drinking whisky or wine’. And, of course, John Betjeman: ‘And girls in slacks remember Dad,/