Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: Noël Coward on evolution

Darwin’s iguana on display at the American Museum of Natural History. Credit: Mario Tama/Getty Images 
issue 02 March 2024

In Competition No. 3338 you were invited to submit an essay on the topic of evolution in the style of the writer of your choice.

In a top-notch entry, Basil Ransome-Davies’s twist on Larkin’s ‘Annus Mirabilis’, Janine Beacham’s Edgar Allan Poe and Russell Chamberlain’s imagining of Kipling’s final Just So story, How Every Creature Got All Its Characteristics, earn honourable mentions:

I have pondered in times numerous, as via fossils, skull to humerus,
how our ancestors developed through six million years or more –
and agreed with the solution, as per Darwin, evolution;
thus, the change from apelike primates to bipedal I’ll explore.
’Tis



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