In Competition No. 3286, you were invited to submit a toe-curling Valentine poem to Harry, or to the love object of your choice. Meghan and her frightful poems were the inspiration for this assignment but perhaps we should cut her some slack; as Carol Ann Duffy has said, love poetry is the hardest to write.
In Competition No. 3285, you were invited to supply an extract from the libretto of a musical based on the life story of a politician. Berlusconi: A New Musical, which comes to Southwark Playhouse next month, is described enticingly on the theatre’s website as ‘a hilarious, naughty, noisy exposé of the original perma-tanned media mogul
In Competition No. 3284, you were invited to supply a topical short story that begins with the last line of a well-known novel and ends with the first. Much has been written about the rise of AI bot ChatGPT (from zero users to several million its first two weeks!), and reader Alistair Kelman fed it
In Competition No. 3283, you were invited to submit ‘A Peer’s Lament’. There was a smattering of references to Baroness Mone, whose travails prompted this challenge. But of course members of the Upper House have plenty to worry about besides, as winningly detailed in a lively and varied entry that contained echoes ranging from Poe,
In Competition No. 3282, you were invited to submit a short story narrated from an un-usual perspective. The seed for this challenge was Kim Stanley-Robinson’s cli-fi novel Ministry For the Future, described by the New Yorker as ‘both harrowing and heartening’. One of its chapters is narrated by a carbon atom, another by the market;
In Competition No. 3281, you were invited to provide 16 lines of cheerful welcome to 2023 in the metre of Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’. ‘Ring out the old, ring in the new,’ wrote the poet in ‘Ring out, wild bells’, part of ‘In Memoriam’. Hats off to all: it was a terrific entry – cheery but
In Competition No. 3280, you were invited to submit an updating of W.H. Auden’s ‘Night Mail’ entitled ‘Email’. ‘Night Mail’ was written to accompany a section of the excellent 1936 documentary about the London to Glasgow Postal Special directed by Basil Wright and Harry Watt (who described Auden as looking like a ‘half-witted Swedish deckhand’).
In Competition No. 3279, you were invited to submit an extract from a contemporary reimagining of Charles Dickens’s A ChristmasCarol. In 2018, the former children’s laureate Michael Rosen updated the novella – my ‘Ghostly little book’ as Dickens called it – for a 21st-century age of austerity; fast forward a few years and its themes
In Competition No. 3278, you were invited to supply a well-known writer’s response to the question what makes the perfect citizen? In 1970, as part of a school project, a ten-year-old wrote to Charles M. Schulz to ask him a similar question. But the boy asked what makes a ‘good’ rather than ‘perfect’ citizen, and
In Competition No. 3277, you were invited to supply a poem to mark the 100th anniversary of the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb. Fifty years ago, amid a wave of Tut mania, some 1.6 million people queued up to see the boy king at the British Museum. Nick MacKinnon and his mum were among them and
In Competition No. 3276, you were invited to supply an extract from the memoir of a celebrity with some unfortunate misprints. Step forward, Nick MacKinnon’s Matt Hancock: ‘I was sorry that “bushtucker trials” wasn’t a typo, as I am expert at handling pubic heath during box-tickling exercises on hidden cameras’; Basil Ransome-Davies’s Nigel Farage: ‘I
In Competition No. 3275, you were invited to follow the format and formula of Lewis Carroll’s ‘The Mad Gardener’s Song’ and supply a poem entitled ‘The Deluded Politician’. The same challenge was set 15 or so years ago, and on that occasion Tony Blair hogged the limelight. This time around, you were rather more spoiled
In Competition No. 3274, you were invited to supply toe-curling analogies. Bad writing has attracted some high-brow fans. J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis revelled in the overwrought prose of the ‘uniquely dreadful’ Amanda Kittrick Ros, and used to take it in turns to read aloud from her work to see which of them could last
In Competition No. 3273, you were invited to supply a poem addressing a well-known poem of your choice. In a keenly contested week, honourable mentions go to Robin Hill’s response to John McCrae’s 1915 rondeau ‘In Flanders Fields’ (which was rejected for publication by this magazine), Chris Ramsey and Alex Steelsmith. The winners take £20. If
In Competition No. 3272, you were invited to imagine a well-known diarist, real or fictitious, commenting on contemporary events. This month marks the 40th anniversary of the debut of adolescent diarist Adrian Mole, and several competitors imagined what he would have made of these turbulent times. Here’s Janine Beacham: ‘I have tested positive for Covid,
In Competition No. 3271, you were invited to submit a poem about the Oxford comma. Thérèse Coffey’s much-maligned edict about this divisive piece of punctuation seems a long time ago now, but your entries – tremendous; well done – brought it all back. Though my head was turned by Frank McDonald’s villanelle, John O’Byrne’s haiku
In Competition No. 3270, you were invited to submit a short story entitled ‘The Queue’. As well as inspiring this challenge, the queue to file past the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II during her lying-in-state in Westminster Hall spawned countless jokes and memes, obsessed crowd psychologists and became the top trending topic on Twitter. It
In Competition No. 3269, you were invited to write a poem about Her late Majesty’s favourite things. Alongside the more familiar royal predilections – corgis, horses, Dubonnet and gin, Corrie, the colour blue – was the revelation that the Queen was partial to a spot of heavy metal, and in particular Ozzy Osborne, though perhaps
In Competition No. 3268, you were invited to recast an extract from children’s literature in the horror genre. In the forthcoming indie slasher film Winnie-the-Pooh: Bloody and Honey, the seed for this challenge, an unhinged Pooh and Piglet run amok in Hundred Acre Wood, indulging in some eye-gouging and decapitation before gorging themselves on honey.
In Competition No. 3267, you were invited to supply a song from the songbook of one of today’s corporate giants. Songs of The IBM, published in the 1930s, inspired this challenge, and you can listen to original renditions of zingers such as the hymn-like anthem ‘Hail to The IBM’ and the more jaunty, show tune-y
