Spectator competition winners: The polar bear who came to tea

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 on, though, cli-fi, like the thermometer, is inexorably on the rise and you were invited to jump on the bandwagon.

I was taken with J.C.H. Mounsey’s Conan Doyle-inflected ‘The Swedish Cassandra’, and with Joe Houlihan’s poignant tale of Pooh and friends in the Hundred Acre Desert: ‘We need honey. Piglet, did you bring the honey jar?… Piglet shuffled his little feet. “All the bees are dead,” he said.’

A commendation also goes to Brian Murdoch, who just missed out on a spot in the winning line-up. He was edged out by the entries below, which net their authors £30.

Sophie was having tea with her mummy when there was a knock at the door. ‘Who could that be?’ said Mummy. ‘It can’t be the milkman or the postman because we are the last remaining humans on the planet. And it can’t be Daddy, because he is on the Wall, repelling marauding mutant invaders! When Mummy opened the door, in swam a giant polar bear. ‘Excuse me,’ said the polar bear, ‘but I’m very hungry. It’s a bloody long swim from Svalbard to Kettering-on-Sea. Could I have some tea?’ ‘Of course!’ said Mummy. ‘Would you like some grasshopper and seaweed soup?’ But the polar bear didn’t just eat one bowl of soup, he ate all the soup, and all the acorns, all the lab-grown microalgae, then he ate Sophie, then her mummy. But he was still hungry! So he sat, waiting for Daddy to come home.