In Competition No. 3208 you were invited to submit a short story whose first or last line is: ‘“Is there anybody there?” said the Traveller.’ The given line opens Walter de la Mare’s slippery, haunting, much-anthologised ‘The Listeners’ and many entries echoed the 1912 poem’s supernatural theme. An honourable mention to George Simmers and David
In Competition No. 3207 you were invited to submit a verse obituary of Silvio Berlusconi. The Italian former prime minister who, despite sex scandals and court battles, managed three stints as PM, died last month aged 86. His more startling gaffes included suggesting that Abruzzo earthquake survivors see their situation as ‘a weekend of camping’
In Competition No. 3306, you were invited to submit a poem about procrastination. Procrastination looms large in Out of Sheer Rage, Geoff Dyer’s hilarious account of his attempt to write a study of D.H. Lawrence, and it struck me as an excellent topic for a competition. As Samuel Johnson wrote, the tendency to put things
In Competition No. 3305, you were invited to submit a sonnet entitled ‘Sonnet On Famous And Familiar Sonnets’. The germ for this challenge was ‘Sonnet On Famous And Familiar Sonnets And Experiences’ by the gifted, troubled Delmore Schwartz, friend to Robert Lowell and John Berryman (who wrote a suite of poems in memory of him).
In Competition No. 3304, you were invited to submit Shakespeare’s reflections on a pressing issue of your choice. In BBC Radio Four’s Taking Issue With Shakespeare, which prompted this task, Michael Gove discusses levelling up with reference to King Lear, Will Self reflects on toxic masculinity in Hamlet, and Gordon Brown draws parallels between a
In Competition No. 3303, you were invited to submit an explanation of the facts of life by a person from the field of fact or fiction who might be deemed a surprising choice. A commendation to A.R. Duncan-Jones, whose lesson harnessed the reverse chronology of Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow: ‘Every ejaculation is premature. Well, it
In Competition No. 3302, you were invited to compose a dating app profile for a writer of your choice. To mark the centenary last year of Philip Larkin’s birth, the poet Imtiaz Dharker wrote ‘Swiping left on Larkin’ in which she imagined how, given his complicated relationship with intimacy, the poet would present himself on
In Competition No. 3301, you were invited to delete one letter in the title of a well-known novel and provide an extract from the new work. This one pulled in the punters. Highlights included Russell Chamberlain’s All the Pretty Hoses and Ralph Bateman’s Bleak Hose:‘Water everywhere. Water up the river, where it flows among green
In Competition No. 3300, you were invited to describe in verse a meal of your choice with a well-known poet, living or dead. The entry was a whopper, with too many star performers to name individually. Hats off, all round. The winners, which include David Silverman’s account of going on a bender with Dante, take
In Competition No. 3299, you were invited to supply a short story that takes as its title the title of a Beatles song. Haruki Murakami used Beatles tracks from the album Rubber Soul as names for both his 1987 novel Norwegian Wood and a short story, ‘Drive My Car’. But the Japanese writer has confessed
In Competition No. 3298, you were invited to provide a book review in three haiku. When I saw that the unofficial poet laureate of Twitter Brian Bilston had tweeted some haiku book reviews, I thought I’d challenge you to do something along the same lines. The traditional Japanese haiku is a snapshot of a moment
In Competition No. 3297, you were invited to provide a psychiatrist’s report on a well-known literary character. The germ of this challenge was an interview with Olivia Colman, who played Miss Havisham in a recent adaptation of Great Expectations, in which the actress said of her character: ‘It’s terrible what happens to Miss Havisham… If
In Competition No. 3296, you were invited to provide a poem whose rhyme words are all at least three syllables. You riffed off W.S. Gilbert, Wordsworth and Dylan Thomas,among others, in limericks, double dactyls and villanelles, about subjects ranging from Gary Lineker to sex dolls. Philip Roe, Barbara Jones and Chris Ramsey shone, but the winners
In Competition No. 3295, you were invited to submit a comically appalling final paragraph to the worst of all possible novels. From time to time, I set a challenge that owes a debt to the Victorian novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton – who enjoyed a brief burst of popularity in his day, before falling out of favour
In Competition No. 3294, you were invited to provide the first 16 lines of an ode to a turnip or another similarly unglamorous vegetable. This assignment was prompted, of course, by Thérèse Coffey’s suggestion that we respond to shortages in salad vegetables by embracing the turnip. But I also had in mind the wonderful odes
In Competition No. 3293, you were invited to provide an extract from the autobiography of a well-known public figure which manages to make a very interesting life sound extraordinarily dull. I am grateful to Sarah Drury for suggesting this terrific challenge. Honourable mentions, in a modest-sized entry, go to Sir Alec Guinness’s Spam anecdote (Jonathan
In Competition No. 3292, you were invited to provide a poem to mark the death of Betty Boothroyd. The formidable Lady Boothroyd – the Guardian obituarist’s description of her exuding ‘warmth and wit’ and ‘a whiff of glamour’ was spot-on – brought out the best in you. There were neat acrostics from David Silverman and
In Competition No. 3291, you were invited to provide a profile of a well-known person in which their qualities are compared to items of food or drink. A commendation to Chris O’Carroll for his gastronomical portrait of Jeremy Clarkson – ‘…the scorching sarcasm he deploys in lieu of wit manages to combine the sadistic fire
In Competition No. 3290, you were invited to recast the Lord’s Prayer as a sonnet. The late Frank Kermode reckoned that any schoolboy can write a sonnet, but this challenge was a deceptively simple one; as Nick MacKinnon observed: ‘the Lord’s Prayer is very efficient’. Nonetheless, it drew a large and witty haul, in which
In Competition No. 3289, you were invited to provide an extract from a politically correct version of a work by an unreconstructed male novelist or poet. An honourable mention to Alex Steelsmith for his reimagining of ‘Song of Myself’ by Walt Whitman, celebrated poet but also author of the long-forgotten Manly Health and Training in
