Literary competition

This week competitors are invited to submit a lighthearted poem, of up to 16 lines, on a serious subject. For inspiration have a look at J.B.S. Haldane’s 1964 comic poem ‘Cancer is a funny thing’. Please email entries to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 7 August and mark them Competition 2810. Here are the results of this week’s comp, in which competitors were invited to submit a hatchet job by a well-known author of their choice on a book or poem by another well-known writer.

The Spectator literary competition has been going strong for decades. Every week readers are invited to show off, in verse or prose, their wit, verbal dexterity and satirical genius. We have had parodies and palinodes; lipograms, limericks and double dactyls; aphorisms and acrostics. The results are brilliant, original and often hilarious. Certain names do crop up over and again in the winning line-up (Basil Ransome-Davies is the one everyone remembers). But these are the veterans. They have had decades of practice. Newcomers do triumph from time to time, and we would like there to be more of them. So we have decided that it is time to throw down the