In Competition No. 2758 you were invited to submit a horoscope for Cancer or Leo written by a well-known literary figure past or present. I regretted not having space for William Danes-Volkov’s horoscopic Hemingway: ‘Maybe someone else will listen to you in the cold air of Friday in the high mountains, or maybe money will
In Competition No. 2757 you were invited to introduce a note of unwelcome reality into a song from a musical. Thanks to Brian Allgar for suggesting this corker of a competition, which attracted a large entry. You might have taken as your model ‘Pore Jud is Daid’ from Oklahoma!, which, as Josephine Boyle points out,
In Competition No. 2756 you were invited to submit your contribution to the booming genre of Scandinavian crime fiction. Guidance is at hand courtesy of Barry Forshaw, author of Death in a Cold Climate: A Guide to Scandinavian Crime Fiction, who has compiled a list of ten tips on how to write a masterpiece of
In Competition No. 2755 you were invited to submit an ‘Ode to rain’. No doubt you saw this one coming, what with monsoon June and July’s 50 shades of grey skies. In any case, the lively and entertaining postbag the challenge elicited was certainly a welcome antidote to the ongoing misery of being semi-housebound or
In Competition No. 2754 you were invited to submit an example from the Selected Poems of a contemporary politician. Politician-poets have met with varying degrees of success. While Jimmy Carter’s efforts prompted literary heavyweight Harold Bloom to pronounce him ‘in my judgment literally the worst poet in the United States’, the youthful dabblings of Barack
In Competition No. 2753 you were invited to submit a new national anthem for Greece. The entry was split between those who present Greece’s woes as being mostly self-inflicted and a more sympathetic bunch, who acknowledge the wider forces that may have helped to bring this once great nation to its knees. Both camps are
In Competition No. 2752 you were invited to submit a short story ending with the phrase: ‘It is not all pleasure, this exploration.’ Dr Livingstone’s pronouncement, written in 1873 a few days before his wretched death, is putting it mildly. His final days had been plagued by pneumonia, malaria, foot ulcers, piles, rotting teeth, leeches,
In Competition No. 2751 you were invited to paint a portrait in verse of Ladies’ Day at Royal Ascot. In his Turf column last year, Robin Oakley wondered what the poet who, in 1823, described ‘the Thursday goings-on as “Ladies Day …when the women, like angels, look sweetly divine”’ would make of today’s proceedings. Well,
In Competition No. 2750 you were invited to submit a poem in praise of one of the deadly sins. The challenge was prompted by the following surprising admission by Taki in a High Life column earlier this year: ‘Lust, gluttony, pride, wrath and sloth I am rather proud to be guilty of, especially the first
In Competition No. 2743 you were invited to submit a recipe as it might have been written by an author of your choice. Kafka’s Soup, a complete history of world literature in 14 recipes by Mark Crick gave me the idea for this challenge. It contains such gastronomic delights as Cheese on Toast à la
In Competition No. 2742 you were invited to take as your first line ‘Dear Lord the day of eggs is here…’, which is the opening to Amanda McKittrick Ros’s poem ‘Eastertide’, and continue, in a similarly bad vein, for up to 16 lines. Described in the Oxford Companion to Irish Literature as ‘uniquely dreadful’, McKittrick
In Competition No. 2741 you were invited to submit an extract from the libretto of an opera that pays homage to the town of your choice. The Lottery-funded operatic venture Swindon: the Opera, which inspired the comp, catapulted that unlovely town into the cultural spotlight, and this assignment was meant to be an exercise in
In Competition No. 2740 you were invited to submit the ten work Commandments of the writer of your choice, living or dead. There were some cracking entries this week — far more winners than there is space to print. Here is a taste of Brian Murdoch’s Tolkien: ‘1. If a book’s worth writing, it’s worth
In Competition No. 2739 you were invited to submit a poem lamenting an impulse buy on eBay. A hair from Justin Bieber’s chest; a colossal concrete brontosaurus; a lifesize poster of Albert Einstein; Franz Kafka’s shirt (with an authenticating Post-it note by Max Brod). These were just a few of the regrettable but hugely entertaining
In Competition No. 2738 you were invited to concoct a government ad that bravely attempts to attract applicants to an especially unappealing job of your invention. Some time ago a reader brought to my attention an ad for the position of ‘Band 3 Process Developers in the VOA2015 Process Team’. Such was its mind-boggling impenetrability
In Competition No. 2737 you were invited to submit a double dactyl. This popular and, judging by the size of the entry, extraordinarily compulsive poetic parlour game was invented in the Sixties by the celebrated poets Anthony Hecht and John Hollander and is described in the blurb of Jiggery-Pokery, their magnificent compendium of the form,
In Competition No. 2736 you were invited to submit bible stories as retold by modern authors. There were plenty of eager contenders, and unsurprisingly so. Works of heavyweight literary scholarship have documented the all-pervasive influence of the King James Bible on British and American literature. The rhythms of its language are clearly discernible in the
In Competition No. 2735 you were invited to take as your first line ‘My love is like a [fill in blank]’, and continue, in light verse. Amid the ailments — ‘a drippy nose’, ‘a whooping cough’; the animals — ‘a three-toed sloth’, ‘a sea urchin’; and foodstuffs galore: ‘ripe Gorgonzola’, ‘ a tub of lard’,
In Competition No. 2734 you were invited to provide anagrams of lines from Shakespearean sonnets. These assignments are not the most popular but every so often the urge to send you to anagram hell gets the better of me. ‘I found this competition exasperatingly difficult,’ wrote Josephine Boyle. Equally exasperated, it seems, was Basil Ransome-Davies,
In Competition No. 2733 you were invited to condense the plot of a Dickens novel into a triple limerick. In case you hadn’t noticed, it would have been Dickens’s 200th birthday this week, and this assignment is a modest contribution to the avalanche of Dickens-related events unleashed across the globe by the bicentenary. (Even estate