In Competition No. 3254, you were invited to tweak a well-known book title to reflect the straitened times we live in and provide an extract. Honourable mentions, in a closely contested week, go to Mark Ambrose’s To Grill a Mockingbird, David Silverman’s The Great Gas Bill and to a trio of Alice’s Adventures in Poundlands
In Competition No. 3253, you were invited to write a poem entitled ‘Song of Myself’ in the style of the poet of your choice. High fives all round for a terrific entry, and an honourable mention to Martin Parker/Ogden Nash: From spermery to wormery via germery and infirmery. Looking back, life has been mostly alas
In Competition No. 3252, you were invited to write a letter of condolence on the mis-fortune of an acquaintance which, intentionally or not, would have the effect of lowering rather than raising the spirits. An example of how not to write a condolence letter, according to New York-based funeral director Amy Cunningham, was Nancy Mitford’s
In Competition No. 3251, you were invited to submit a poem to mark the Queen’s platinum jubilee in the style of a poet present or past. Perhaps inspired by the lines written by William McGonagall to mark the death of his beloved Queen Victoria – Alas! our noble and generous Queen Victoria is dead,/And I
In Competition No. 3250, you were invited to submit a sonnet to Mammon. It was ‘Epigram for Wall Street’, attributed to the oft-impoverished Edgar Allan Poe, that prompted me to set this moolah-themed challenge. In a large, thoughtful and winningly varied entry, there were echoes ranging from Keats, Milton and Barrett Browning to Gordon Gekko.
In Competition No. 3249, you were invited to submit an extract from a Mills & Boon novel whose central character is a contemporary politician. The much-mocked pictures of a proudly hirsute, manspreading Macron, looking every inch the M&B hero, gave me the idea for this challenge. But he was nudged aside – in a truly
In Competition No. 3248, you were asked to submit the last will and testament of a fictional character. In a smallish entry, Frank McDonald’s Ancient Mariner made a splash: To make amends with my last breath I must give more than words, So my small fortune I bequeath To a charity for birds. I was
In Competition No. 3247, you were asked to submit the reflections of a well-known writer on a career path they might have taken. Most famous writers have had day jobs – Kurt Vonnegut sold Saabs, Harper Lee worked as an airline ticket agent, and Joseph Heller was a blacksmith’s apprentice. But what about those missed
In Competition No. 3246, you were invited to submit a poem in the style of the poet of your choice about a problematic appendage. Taking pride of place alongside Philip Larkin’s troublesome penis were Heaney’s big toe, Shelley’s belly, and a series of noses, among them Mike Morrison/Ogden Nash: This nose/conk/beak/hooter/schnozzle Has brought me nothing
In Competition No. 3245, you were asked to take a passage from a classic of French literature and recast it in Franglais. This challenge invited you to engage in the parlour game popularised by the late Miles Kington, whose much-loved ‘Let’s Parler Franglais’ columns in Punch were described by Michael Bywater as a ‘macaronic jeu
In Competition No. 3244, you were invited to submit a poem to mark St George’s Day that rivals in awfulness the one Bono recently penned for St Paddy. As Sam Leith wrote, in a terrifically funny and instructive piece, Bono’s offering was ‘technically incompetent to a degree that constituted an insult to the very craft
In Competition No. 3243, you were invited to submit a poem about the recent discovery of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance. This comp, suggested by a kind reader who thought a chink of good cheer amid the general bleakness worth celebrating, elicited a smallish entry in which echoes ranged from Keats to Benny Hill. An honourable
In Competition No. 3242, you were asked to submit a short story that is a mash-up of cli-fi with a genre of your choice. In his 2016 book The Great Derangement, the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh questioned why ‘climate change cast a much smaller shadow on literature than it does on the world’. Six years
In Competition No. 3241, you were invited to submit a spring triolet. Banjo Paterson, the bard of the bush, had this to say about the triolet in 1894: Of all the sickly forms of verse, Commend me to the triolet.It makes bad writers somewhat worse: Of all the sickly forms of verse… But this challenge
In Competition No. 3240, you were invited to tell the life story of a well-known figure in three limericks. In the excellent How to Be Well-Versed in Poetry, E.O. Parrott summed up the charms of the form neatly: With a shape of its own it’s imbued – That’s the limerick, witty or lewd; Two
In Competition No. 3239, you were invited to submit political manifestos inspired by literary heroes. Sajid Javid loves Ayn Rand: twice a year, he reads the courtroom scene in The Fountainhead. Justin Trudeau is a Stephen King super-fan, Boris Johnson reckons Flashman is ‘the greatest’ and Macron is mad for Molière (he can recite chunks
In Competition No. 3238, you were invited to submit a poem about a literary feud. Wallace Stevens’s 1936 fisticuffs with Ernest Hemingway cropped up several times in what was a modestly sized but entertaining entry. The insurance executive-poet broke his hand, in two places, in the course of an unedifying punch-up in Key West (‘Stevens
In Competition No. 3237, you were invited to submit a short story using words of only one syllable. This challenge produced a delightfully diverse entry with echoes of Dr Seuss, Hemingway, Kafka, Shakespeare and Beckett. The winning slots were keenly contested and I regretted not having space for Frank McDonald’s meditation on St Paul and
In Competition No. 3236, you were invited to submit a poem that begins ‘Oh my love is like…’ . From the funny and sweet to the waspish and jaundiced, the entry ranged pleasingly far and wide; as the poet Patrick Kavanagh wrote in his sonnet ‘The Hospital’ (‘A year ago I fell in love with
In Competition No. 3235, you were invited to invent a prequel to a well-known work of literature and supply an extract from it. In a stellar entry, Nick MacKinnon, Sue Pickard, Max Ross, Bob Trewin and Lorna Wood all shone, but the £25 prizes go to the following: Believing it never to be my Fortune
