Literary competition

For the latest challenge you were asked to submit a poem or a short story that begins ‘It started with a tweet…’. Hats off to Philip Machin for an appropriately pithy submission: It started with a tweet — There’s nothing wrong in that — But, sadly, indiscreet: It ended with a cat. Elsewhere, in a varied and engaging entry, there were echoes of Shelley’s skylark, Lear’s owl and Hitchcock’s Birds. The winners below are rewarded with £25 each. W.J. Webster It started with a tweet, a joke at his expense, okay, but just a quip intended to provoke a smile or some quick counter-thrust: instead he opted to deplore its

The call to supply a parable rewritten in the style of a well-known author drew a lively and entertaining entry. Like Milton, many of you seemed taken with the Parable of the Talents. Here is Sylvia Fairley channelling Mark Haddon: ‘He gave five talents to one, that’s 14,983 shekels, and two to the next, 5,993 shekels. Those are prime numbers. I like prime numbers…’ I thought Kafka might loom large but he cropped up only once in a sea of Austens, Hemingways, Trollopes and Wodehouses. Strong performers, in a keenly contested week, were Joseph Harrison, David Silverman, W.H. Thomas, Philip Machin, Hamish Wilson, David Mackie, Jan Snook and Hannah Burden-Teh.

The most recent challenge, suggested by Paul A. Freeman, asked for an elegy on a piece of obsolete technology. There’s nothing like a blast of nostalgia to usher in the new year. Sinclair C5s, faxes, floppy discs, typewriters; all were eloquently hymned. I admired Hamish Wilson’s elegy on a radiogram and John O’Byrne’s Whitman-esque homage to the Walkman: O Walkman! O Walkman! our cassette days are       done, My ears have enjoyed every tune, the tapes I       played are worn, The phone has come, the apps are here, the       playlists all inspiring, But Apple killed this mobile thing for designs    

Your new year’s challenge was to supply an anthem to usher in 2019, starting with the first line of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and continuing in your own way. ‘Is not the Scotch phrase “Auld lang syne” exceedingly expressive?’ wrote Robert Burns to his friend Frances Dunlop in 1788, referring to the words of an old folk song that he had heard, written down and later sent to James Johnson, who published it in the Scots Musical Museum. These days, of course, those words are sung with gusto by the inebriated the world over on New Year’s Eve — an expression of fellowship and nostalgia. Not much of that in the

The festive challenge was to submit a politically correct Christmas carol. One of Donald Trump’s election pledges was to end ‘the war on Christmas’, and he has given the electorate the presidential nod to say ‘Merry Christmas’ again instead of the more inclusive ‘Happy holidays’. But was this ‘war’ a pointless and misguided one in the first place? Adam Gopnik, writing in the New Yorker, has pointed out that Christmas ‘is, at its roots, the very model of a pagan-secular-synthetic festival as much as it is a religious one — just the kind, in fact, that the imaginary anti-Christmas forces are supposed to favour…’. He concludes: ‘The war on Christmas

This fiendishly difficult challenge, to submit a sonnet with the name of a Shakespearean character hidden in each line, pulled in a gratifyingly bumper haul of entries – from old hands and newcomers alike. The odd one or two described it as ‘fun’, but many were considerably less keen – C. Paul Evans, for example: ‘The mother of all horrors, what a comp,/ A theme to turn my ashy locks to dust!…’ It dawned on me, as I read your sonnets, that there were different ways of interpreting the brief. Martin Broomfield took a cryptic approach; others an anagrammatic one. The ambiguity was my fault, and I gave equal consideration

The spark for the latest challenge — to write a short story in the Gothic style with a topical twist — came from the recent reopening of Strawberry Hill House and Garden, the neo-Gothic creation of Horace Walpole, whose 1764 chiller The Castle of Otranto is regarded as the first Gothic novel. Russell Clifton deployed the framing device, updated for contemporary sensibilities: ‘Gathered about the campfire that October evening in Lark Wood, someone suggested we tell horror stories. Trigger warnings were issued, several group members adjourning to the designated safe space of a distant clearing…’ And Sally Fiery imagined the genesis of a 21st-century Frankenstein-like creature: ‘The Doctor …had never

The latest challenge, to supply a short verse biography of a well-known figure from history, produced a commendable entry in which notables long gone — Diotisalvi, Vercingetorix the Gaul, Dr Dee — rubbed shoulders with those still very much with us — Anthony Weiner, Donald Trump, Boris Johnson. There were borrowings from Edward Lear and Lennon and McCartney (‘BoJo was a clown who thought he was a leader/ Made it to King Charles Street too…’) as well as echoes of Ogden Nash. An honourable mention goes to Brian Allgar for getting into the Halloween spirit with his life of Vlad the impaler. On equally eye-catching form were D.A. Prince, Sylvia

For the latest competition you were invited to supply a demotivational poem. This was your opportunity to come up with a bracing antidote to the worldview peddled by an eye-wateringly lucrative self-help industry that feeds on a mix of insecurity and the aspirational narcissism du jour. You came at the challenge from various angles, but the opening to Tracy Davidson’s entry speaks for many: It doesn’t matter what you do in life, It’s just a constant loop of pointless shite. Honourable mentions go to Adrian Fry’s paean to the power of no and to Douglas G. Brown’s 21st-century spin on Longfellow’s ‘Psalm of Life’. The winners, printed below, earn £25

The performance poet Megan Beech was so incensed by the abuse heaped by Twitter trolls on her idol Mary Beard that she wrote a poem called ‘When I Grow Up I Want to Be Mary Beard’ (‘an academic and a classy lady to boot’). With this in mind, I invited you to provide a poem with the same title but substituting your own choice for Professor Beard. Another classicist, the esteemed Peter Jones, was the object of W.J. Webster’s affection. Otherwise it was an eclectic entry that ranged from the Dalai Lama to Donald Trump. Commendations to Alan Millard, Douglas G. Brown and Paul Carpenter, who wants to be Rod

The idea for the latest challenge, to provide a spoof version of the song ‘My Favourite Things’ for the constituency/demographic of your choice, was prompted by my discovery of a reimagining of the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic recast as it might have been sung by an elderly Julie Andrews (‘Maalox and nose drops and needles for knitting,/ Walkers and handrails and new dental fittings…’). It seemed to go down well, drawing an entry that ranged far and wide, from Basil Ransome-Davies’s fetishists (‘Dildoes and butt plugs that tirelessly tingle,/ Electrical probes and Ben Wa balls that jingle…’) to Max Gutmann’s Fox News viewers (‘Gawking at lovely harassable females,/ Daily reminders

The latest competition asked for a sonnet in reverse, modelled on Rupert Brooke’s ‘Sonnet Reversed’, which turns upside-down both the form — it begins on the rhyming couplet — and the Petrarchan concept of idealised love, starting on a romantic high but ending in prosaic banality. This challenge produced a delightfully varied and engaging entry. Honourable mentions go to Basil Ransome-Davies, Jennifer Pearson, David Shields, George Simmers and Philip Roe. The winners, printed below, are rewarded with £20 each. Max Ross Art soared to heights as high as man could go When David rose from Michelangelo. A fractured piece of marble, an idea, And genius fingers made the marble live.

The seed of the latest assignment — to provide a tale of travel misery on behalf of a well-known voyager from the fields of fact or fiction — was a column in the Observer called My Crap Holiday, which invited readers to share their travel horrors: inclement weather, devil children, oven-like bedrooms, Arctic bedrooms, wardrobe-like bedrooms — you get the idea. I had high hopes of this one but it clearly failed to light your fire, producing only a modest haul of entries — albeit with a few crackers. D.A. Prince’s Lucy Honeychurch was thoroughly hacked off with Florence: ‘If it wasn’t Cousin Charlotte twitching at every imagined slight and

The inspiration for the latest challenge, to submit a newspaper leading article exposing the corrupting influence of a seemingly innocuous everyday item, was the revelation, in a recent letter to the Times, that patent leather shoes were outlawed at a British girls’ public school as recently as the 1980s, lest they reflect undergarments and ‘excite the gardeners’. In a smallish field with a narrow focus, you divided fairly equally between those who consider fruit (bananas, in particular) to be the Devil’s work and those who reckon that the real threat to vulnerable young minds is cutlery. As usual with this type of challenge, the entries that stood out were those