Literary competition

In a challenge inspired by the Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction award, competitors were invited to submit a libido-dampening ‘love scene’ from a novel. Rhoda Koenig and Auberon Waugh set up the award to shine a spotlight of shame on poorly written, perfunctory or redundant passages of sexual description and poor old Morrissey’s already much-mocked List of the Lost is hotly tipped to scoop this year’s gong. You certainly gave Mozzer a run for his money. John Griffiths-Colby’s entry made me shudder but not in ecstasy — ‘In spite of the bandage having not been changed for the best part of a week, he felt her touch acutely through

The latest challenge was to describe an everyday object, in verse, from the point of view of a Martian. James Fenton coined the term Martian to describe the work of poets such as Craig Raine and Christopher Reid, whose poems cast familiar objects in an unfamiliar light. In his 1979 poem ‘A Martian Sends a Postcard Home’ Raine describes books, or ‘caxtons’ as he calls them, as ‘mechanical birds with many wings/ and some are treasured for their markings —/ they cause the eyes to melt/or the body to shriek without pain…’ This was a challenging comp. Children are well suited to writing Martian but it’s trickier for adults with

The idea for the latest challenge was sent in by a reader who, inspired by the emergence of the ‘slanket’, the ‘cardigown’ and the ‘onesie’, suggested inviting competitors to invent new garments and provide definitions. It made for an excellent comp. It has been claimed that we have Sir Winston Churchill to thank for the onesie. Britain’s wartime leader designed his ‘siren’ suit all-in-one with practical considerations in mind, but ended up with quite a collection in a variety of colours, patterns and fabrics. He once wore one to the White House, and so impressed the president’s wife that she announced she was having one made for her husband. Both

The call for poems composed entirely of three-letter words certainly ruffled some feathers. ‘This is the most difficult comp you have set and has driven me mad!’ said Adrian Fry. It was a nasty assignment, I admit, but it could have been so much worse. Take John Fuller’s wonderful poem ‘The Kiss’: not only is it made up entirely of three-letter words; it also has three words per line in three three-line stanzas. Given the potentially dispiriting technical nature of the challenge, I was surprised by both the number of entries and the standard (high). There was a lot of skill and wit on show and it was unusually difficult

The invitation to step into the shoes of Andrew Marvell’s coy mistress attracted a jumbo entry. Clearly lots of you think it’s high time she had her say. But you weren’t the first to pipe up on her behalf. Marvell’s seductive overtures failed to persuade the Australian (male) poet A.D. Hope. Here’s an extract from his blistering reply, ‘His Coy Mistress to Mr Marvell’, published in 1978: Had you addressed me in such terms And prattled less of graves and worms, I might, who knows, have warmed to you; But, as things stand, must bid adieu The contemporary American poet Annie Finch wasn’t having any of it either. Her equally

The late Sir Keith Joseph once gave a speech in which he said that the government was trying to ‘Bennboozle’ the country. You were asked to submit coinages inspired by today’s politicians, supplying full dictionary definitions and illustrative examples of their use. As is often the case with this sort of competition, many of you were thinking along similar, albeit entertaining lines. Charles Curran, Barry Baldwin and R.M. Goddard all coined harmanise though with varying definitions, and kendalliance and corbynate also cropped up several times. I was tickled by Basil Ransome-Davies’s faragiste (a chancer or failed opportunist, one who does not live up to his own publicity); D.A. Prince’s decameron

The recent invitation to submit an extract from the school report of a well-known author, living or dead went down well, attracting a large and spirited entry. Teachers often get it wrong, of course. Eight-year-old Charlotte Brontë was described by hers in less than glowing terms: she ‘writes indifferently’ and ‘knows nothing of grammar, geography, history or accomplishments’. In 1943 Beryl Bainbridge, aged 9, elicited the following tart assessment: ‘Though her written work is the product of an obviously lively imagination, it is a pity that her spelling derives from the same source.’ And according to P.G. Wodehouse’s 1899 report from Dulwich College, he had ‘the most distorted ideas about

The request for tributes in verse to a once-popular foodstuff that has fallen out of favour generated a large and lively postbag. Bill Greenwell’s entry (Spangles!) brought to mind childhood pleasures, as did Sid Field’s (Creamola) and Jayne Osborn’s (Angel Delight). But I still shudder at the memory of spam fritters, and Alan Millard’s valiant attempt to make them sound appealing fell on stony ground: More fit to nibble than to gnaw But no less tasty, cooked or raw Both Brian Allgar and Dorothy Pope mourned the passing of Fuller’s Walnut Cake, and Richard McCarthy submitted a rousing tribute to mutton in the style of Swinburne. All three deserve a

The latest challenge, to submit a thriller in three text messages, seemed straightforward enough but it turned out to be a tough assignment that stretched veterans and newcomers alike. As in all forms of micro-fiction — the mini-masterpiece attributed to Hemingway, ‘For sale: baby shoes, never worn’, springs to mind — it’s all about the reader filling in the gaps. Many entrants went for the mistaken-identity trope, which became rather monotonous after a time. But while I applauded those who attempted a more original twist, most of these didn’t quite come off. The standard was somewhat disappointing, then, but there were some creditable exceptions, printed below. They earn their authors

Transport for London’s efforts to use verse to encourage Tube users to mind their manners produced poems whose rhyme and scansion would have made William McGonagall blush. So it was over to the experts: competitors were invited to imagine that poets, living or dead, had been recruited to improve on the unlovely likes of: ‘We really don’t mean to chide/ But try to move along inside/ So fellow travellers won’t have to face/ An invasion of their personal space.’ Adrian Fry’s Emily Dickinson — ‘Because I would not mind the gap’ — was an impressive runner-up, as were Charles Clive-Ponsonby-Fane, Mike Morrison and Alanna Blake, but they were outstripped by

Given the kerfuffle caused by the recent publication of Craig Raine’s ‘Gatwick’ in the London Review of Books, I thought it might be interesting to invite competitors to compose their own poem about an encounter in an airport. Raine’s poem brought the Twitter bullies out in force to broadcast their disgust at an elderly poet sharing his lustful thoughts about young women. Fiona Pitt-Kethley’s submission imagines a scenario in which one of them wreaks her revenge: ‘We’ll see whose arse is large next time he comes/ To my desk in the airport. I’ve got chums/ With latex gloves and penetrating ways,/ Prepared to hold and search for many days.’ Others

To mark the beginning of Wimbledon, competitors were invited to take as their first line ‘There’s a breathless hush on the centre court’ and continue for up to 15 lines in the style of Sir Henry Newbolt’s 1897 poem ‘Vitaï Lampada’. Newbolt’s poem (which he came to resent, describing it as a ‘Frankenstein’s monster) draws parallels between schoolboy cricket and war. Though there were echoes of this conceit in the entry, your responses were impressively varied. Commiserations to unlucky losers John Whitworth, who submitted a charming tribute to Christine Truman, Robert Cross, Sid Field and R.M. Goddard. Those printed below are rewarded with £25 each. Bill Greenwell hoists the championship

A spoof Farrow & Ball paint-colour chart doing the rounds on social media was the inspiration for the latest challenge. Competitors were invited to see if they could outdo the rather unappealing likes of ‘economy mince’, ‘provoked wasp’, ‘magnum of Tizer’ and ‘day at Thorpe Park’ by submitting an article from an interiors magazine featuring paint names of their own invention. High points in an otherwise patchy entry were Adrian Fry’s ‘Dresden licht’, John O’Byrne’s ‘failed rouble’, Alan Millard’s ‘hectic cockerel’, Mike Morrison’s ‘Magaluf mea culpa’ and Bill Greenwell’s ‘tartar’s lips’. Chris O’Carroll nabs the bonus fiver. The rest take £25 apiece. Chris O’Carroll The entryway is done in this

In Competition No. 2903 you were invited to supply a poem incorporating a dozen cricketing terms. English poets love cricket: Housman, Betjeman, Chesterton and Sassoon all wrote about the game. And then, of course, there is Harold Pinter, who encapsulated it so beautifully in two lines: I saw Len Hutton in his prime, Another time, another time. I admired P.C. Parrish’s clever poem in the opaque modernist style of Edith Sitwell. Tim Raikes, Peter Goulding, Nick Hodgson and Rosemary Kirk also stood out in a large and impressive field. The winners earn £25 apiece. Brian Allgar takes £30. Brian Allgar My wife reminds me of a game of cricket: A

The latest comp was inspired by Stephen Spender’s notorious poem ‘The Pylons’, which he likens to ‘nude giant girls that have no secret’. Spender wasn’t praising pylons on aesthetic grounds in his notorious poem, but celebrating the progress that these non-human structures embody: ‘There runs the quick perspective of the future’. The spirit of the Thirties poets — applied to those 21st-century gods technology and consumerism — was very much alive in what was a large and accomplished entry. It was tricky to single out just six prizewinners. Catherine Chandler, Tim Raikes, Bill Greenwell and Alanna Blake shone, but were narrowly pipped to the post by those printed below who