In Competition No. 3211 you were invited to submit a nursery rhyme inspired by the pandemic. When I set this challenge, I had in mind ‘Ring-a-Ring o’ Roses’, the rhyme that is said by some to date from the Great Plague of 1665 (though its origins are a subject of hot scholarly dispute). In a
In Competition No. 3210, you were invited to provide a poem or a piece of prose containing words from the phonetic alphabet. The brief didn’t stipulate that you incorporate all 26 words, but hats off to those who shoehorned them in. In a whopping, wide-ranging entry, with echoes of Keats and MacNeice, and ‘Papa’ Hemingway
In Competition No. 3209, you were invited to provide Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of a Tory MP. Inspiration for this challenge came from a parody of Jaques’s monologue from As You Like It by the writer and politician — and Shakespearean scholar — Horace Twiss (1787–1849). The closing lines of his ‘The Patriot’s Progress’ …Scene the
In Competition No. 3208, you were invited to submit a recipe for marital bliss on behalf of an author of your choice. Pausing only to give an honourable mention to Simon Hunter, I pass you over to this week’s terrific winners who each nab £25. I am the very model of a guide to conjugality
In Competition No. 3207, you were invited to supply an extract from a thriller, written by a well-known politician, that contains clues to the identity of its author. This challenge drew a moderate-sized entry in which there was much to admire, including Janine Beacham’s fusion of Daphne du Maurier and Winston Churchill: ‘I might have
In Competition No. 3206, you were invited to supply a sonnet on the universe. The late Frank Kermode reckoned that the sonnet form is just too easy — try a double sestina, if you’re after a challenge, he said — and comps such as this one certainly draw the crowds. A bumper crop of deftly
In Competition No. 3205, you were invited to supply a rigorous literary-critical analysis of a well-known pop song. Thanks to Oliver Hawkins, who drew to my attention J. Temperance’s real-life analysis of Boney M’s ‘Daddy Cool’ (The New Inquiry, 2015): ‘We may paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari and state that “it is within capitalist society that
In Competition No. 3204, you were invited to supply a rondeau with a summery theme. The best-known English rondeau is the Canadian poet and doctor John McRae’s first world war poem ‘In Flanders Fields’ (which inspired the use of the poppy as a symbol of remembrance). But the form has it roots in medieval and
In Competition No. 3203, you were invited to supply an extract from the newly discovered Shakespeare play Charles III. I haven’t seen Mike Bartlett’s 2014 King Charles III but the theatre critic of this magazine wasn’t impressed: ‘A script that breezily defames the royals ought to be great fun, but this cheerless, overblown little play
In Competition No. 3202, you were invited to replace the word ‘love’ in a well-known book title of your choice with a word of your choosing, and submit a short story of that title. This challenge was prompted by Christopher Hitchens’s description, in his memoir Hitch-22, of an after-dinner game he used to play with
In Competition No. 3201, a contest inspired by Salman ‘naughty but nice’ Rushdie, you were invited to submit advertising copy for the product of your choice in the style of a well-known author. In a huge and hotly contested entry, unlucky losers Bill Greenwell, Brian Murdoch, Ann Drysdale, Tom Adam and Nick MacKinnon were only
In Competition No. 3200, you were invited to retell one of Chaucer’s tales in the style of another author. The voices that dominated, in a medium–sized entry, were those of the Wife of Bath, the Pardoner, the Miller and the Nun’s Priest. Chaucer’s pilgrims were offered a free dinner for the best yarn, but this
In Competition No. 3199, you were invited to supply a poem in which an inanimate object comments on its owner’s behaviour. Shoshana Zuboff’s recent book about the growth of surveillance capitalism gave me the idea for this competition. In it she warns of a future in which, to satisfy big tech’s insatiable appetite for data,
In Competition No. 3198, you were invited to supply an extract from a children’s book that is designed to explain economics to youngsters. The seed for this challenge was former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis’s Talking to My Daughter: A Brief History of Capitalism in which he uses the device of answering questions put by
In Competition No. 3197, you were invited to supply a poem to mark the death of Prince Philip. I wondered if anyone, inspired by his touching lines on the death of his beloved Queen Victoria, might channel the poet and tragedian William McGonagall: Alas! our noble and generous Queen Victoria is dead,And I hope her
In Competition No. 3196, you were invited to supply a reply to the poet from Frances Cornford’s fat woman or Shakespeare’s dark lady. Philip Roe and George Simmers both reminded me that G.K. Chesterton set the bar high with ‘The Fat White Woman Speaks’, his response to Cornford’s triolet (which was also parodied by A.E.
In Competition No. 3195, you were invited to submit an extract from the racier, mass-market version of a well-known literary novel. Speaking at Bath Literature festival in 2015, the author Fay Weldon suggested that writers should write two versions of their books, a high-minded one for print, and a more accessible page-turner for e-readers: ‘Writers
In Competition No. 3194, inspired by Tony Harrison’s poem ‘A Kumquat for John Keats’, you were invited to write a poem of that title but substituting your choice of poet and a piece of fruit. It was a palmary entry, so I’ve made space for an extra winner. Hats off, all round, and £20 each
In Competition No. 3193 you were invited to submit clerihews (two couplets, AABB, metrically clunky, humorous in tone) on members of the royal family, past or present. This one was a crowd-pleaser and drew a whopping entry. An inevitable element of repetition didn’t detract from the overall excellence, so congratulations, all round. I was sorry
In Competition No. 3192 you were invited to submit a short story that features an animal (or animals) taking revenge on humankind. The spur for this challenge was John Gray’s engaging and insightful book Feline Philosophy, which alerted me to Patricia Highsmith’s short story ‘Ming’s Biggest Prey’, about a Siamese cat who eliminates a human
