Literary competition

Spectator literary competition No. 2836 This week you are invited to come up with suitable collective nouns for the following: tweeters; hackers; hoodies; WAGs; environmentalists; bankers; MPs; contrarians. Entries to be emailed, please, to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 19 February. The recent call for extracts from the adolescent diary of a well-known public figure, living or dead, pulled in the punters. The overall standard was impressive and it tough boiling the entry down to just six. Those who were narrowly squeezed out include Pervez Rizvi, P.C. Parrish, Mark Shelton and John Whitworth — and I liked Ralph Rochester’s Baden-Powell doing battle with his raging libido. The winners below take £25

Valentine’s Day is looming and love is in the air. So our competition this week is a profile for an online dating website for a well-known politician, living or dead. Please leave entries (of up to 150 words) in the comments, below, or email to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 12 February. Last week, you were invited to compose an address to an item of food –  inspired by Burns’s ‘Address to a Haggis’, that ‘Great chieftain o the puddin’-race’, but you were not obliged to write in his style. Albert Black went for a Kipling-Burns mash-up and other competitors drew on Shelley and Shakespeare. Jim Hayes, Martin Parker, Mae Scanlan,

Spectator literary competition No. 2833 This week’s task is a fashionably confessional one. We live in an age of emotional incontinence, where spilling the beans to as many people as possible seems to be all the rage, so let’s have an extract from the teenage diary of a well-known public figure, living or dead. Please email entries of up to 150 words to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 29 January. The most recent competition brought forth an entertaining cast of literary pairings, with gentlemen’s gentlemen, sleuths, teachers and doctors featuring most strongly, but not forgetting, too, a sprinkling of sailors, spies, nannies and ladies of the night. The standard was high,

Spectator literary competition No. 2829 Peter Porter called Hull ‘the most poetic city in England’ but would Philip Larkin have agreed? What would he have made of his adopted home city being named 2017’s City of Culture? Answers, please, in verse of up to 16 lines, to be emailed to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 1 January. The recent invitation to confound logic and expectation, and submit nonsense verse on a wintry theme was taken up with gusto, producing a large and lively entry. Honourable mentions to Alanna Blake, Sylvia Fairley, Martin Elster and G.M. Davis, who were unlucky losers. The winners below pocket £25 each. The bonus fiver belongs to

Our competition this week invites you to submit nonsense verse on a wintry theme. The line between sense and nonsense is a blurred one. In his Spectator review of Geoffrey Grigson’s Faber anthology of nonsense verse, Anthony Burgess encapsulated this nicely, noting that Mr Grigson ‘wisely evades, in his preface, anything like a definition of nonsense. He knows that we will only know what nonsense is when we know the nature of sense. Nonsense is something we think we can recognise, just as we think we can recognise poetry, but there has to be an overlap with what we think we can recognise as sense.’ A good way to get yourself in

Spectator literary competition No. 2824 You are invited to submit a double clerihew about a well-known sporting figure, past or present. The rules governing a clerihew are well set out in its Wikipedia entry but here are some additional pointers from the poet James Michie, a master of the form, who regularly contributed clerihews to The Spectator: ‘Clerihews, in my view, must be concise (no elephantine last line), written in straightforward English without inversions; and they are all the better for having some connection, however tenuous, with the real life or character of their subject.’ Please email entries (up to four each) to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 13 November. Here are

Spectator literary competition No. 2822 This week’s challenge is to submit an extract from a scene from a contemporary soap opera (TV or radio) as Shakespeare might have written it. Please email entries, of up to 16 lines, to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 30 October. Here are the results of this week’s challenge, in which competitors were invited to write a poem either in free verse mocking rhymed, metrical verse or in conventional verse mocking free verse.

This week we’ve got Ted Hughes in the red corner and Philip Larkin in the blue. Whose side would you be on? You are invited to write a poem either in free verse mocking rhymed, metrical verse or in conventional verse mocking free verse. Please email entries, of up to 16 lines, to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 9 October and mark them Competition 2819. Here are the results of this week’s challenge, in which competitors were asked to provide a short story with an ingenious twist at the end. Best wishes

This week you are invited to provide a poem, in the manner of Harry Graham’s Perverted Proverbs, questioning the wisdom of a popular proverb. Perverted Proverbs, A Manual of Immorals for the Many was published in 1903 under the pseudonym Col. D Streamer. In it, Graham, who is probably best known for his Ruthless Rhymes (1898), a forerunner of Belloc’s Cautionary Tales, calls into question, with wit and dark humour, popular proverbs such as ‘Virtue is Its Own Reward’. Here is a taste to inspire you: Virtue its own reward? Alas! And what a poor one as a rule! Be Virtuous and Life will pass Like one long term of

This week we are in Roald Dahl territory. You are invited to submit a short story of up to 150 words with an ingenious twist at the end. Please email entries, marked Competition 2816, to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 18 September. Here are the results of the latest competition, in which competitors were invited to submit an application in verse, from the poet of their choice, for the position of poet laureate.

If poets hoping to be Laureate had been required to apply in verse for the position we would now have an interesting archive of poems. You are invited to provide examples of the poetic pitches that might have been made since the role was created in 1668. How about John Milton or Alexander Pope, deliberately passed over by the government of the day because of their questionable politics, or Byron, ruled out on account of his scandalous private life? Please email entries of 16 lines maximum to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 28 August and mark them Competition 2813. Here are the results of this week’s competition, in which competitors were asked to submit

The CEO of Amazon Jeff Bezos has said ‘the physical book and bookstores are dead’. This week competitors are invited to celebrate this endangered species and submit a poem (of up to 16 lines) in praise of bookshops. Please email entries  to lucy @ spectator.co.uk by midday on 21 August and mark them Competition 2812. Here are the results of this week’s challenge, in which competitors were asked to submit a letter liberally sprinkled with evidence of an imperfect grasp of foreign languages. There has been already a welcome influx of newcomers, which is great to see. Keep ’em coming.