Lucy Vickery

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

In Competition No. 3234, you were invited to submit either a poem or a short story entitled ‘Covid’s metamorphoses’. Thanks are due to Frank Upton, who suggested this tremendous and timely challenge. It attracted a pleasingly large and diverse entry (overwhelmingly made up of verse rather than prose), in which the limerick was well represented.

In Competition No. 3233, you were invited to invent a new character for the Mr Men/Little Miss series by Roger Hargreaves and submit an extract from his or her story. The first character to make an appearance, in 1971, was orange Mr Tickle with his long, wiggly arms. Fifty years on, Mr T.’s overly tactile

In Competition No. 3232, you were invited to retell a news story from the past year in sonnet form. An excellent entry this week included submissions ranging far and wide, from Harry Patch and the Everly Brothers to Alaskan walruses and Jeff Bezos’s penis. Commendations to Josephine Boyle, C. Paul Evans, Dorothy Pope, R.M. Goddard,

In Competition No. 3231, you were invited to supply an example of pretentious wine writing. Space is tight and the standard stellar, so to make way for the maximum number of winners I’ll pause only to commiserate with unlucky losers Brian Murdoch and Basil Ransome-Davies before handing over to those printed below, who earn £25

In Competition No. 3230, you were invited to supply a double acrostic poem, the first and last letters of each line, read vertically, spelling out The Spectator and New Statesman in either order. This fiendish technical challenge, designed to sweep away the cobwebs, drew an entry that was on the smallish side but varied and

In Competition No. 3229, you were invited to provide the story of the Nativity retold in the style of a well-known author. Star performers, in a most excellent entry, included Janine Beacham’s W.S. Gilbert: Young Mary was the model of a good and humble Nazarene, So Gabriel requested of her, ‘be our human go-between, you will conceive

In Competition No. 3228, you were invited to provide a well-known extract from adult literature rewritten for inclusion in an anthology of children’s literature. It was Julie Burchill’s verdict, in this magazine, on Sally Rooney’s latest novel that prompted me to set this task: ‘Her writing is so blank,’ she wrote, ‘that in parts it

In Competition No. 3227, you were invited to provide verses to help children remember the sequence of the last eight US presidents. The same challenge was set in these pages more than 30 years ago, and on that occasion the late Martin Fagg, a titan in the world of literary competitions, emerged victorious. Here’s a

In Competition No. 3226, you were invited to rewrite, in pompous and prolix style, any well-known simple poem. The seed for this pleasingly popular challenge was a recasting of ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’, attributed to John Raymond Carson, which begins: ‘Scintillate, scintillate, globule vivific…’ Star performers, in a most excellent and enjoyable entry, include AdrianFry’s