In Competition No. 3074 you were invited to submit a scam letter ghostwritten by a well-known author, living or dead. Falling for a scam is costly and tedious (and more easily done than you might think), but the comedian James Veitch found a silver lining when he decided to engage with his persecutors: the
In Competition No. 3073 you were invited to submit a short story in the Gothic style with a topical twist. The seed of this challenge was the recent reopening of Strawberry Hill House and Garden, the neo-Gothic creation of Horace Walpole, whose 1764 chiller The Castle of Otranto is regarded as the first Gothic
In Competition No. 3072 you were invited to supply a short verse biography of a well-known figure from history. In a commendable entry, notables long gone — Diotisalvi, Vercingetorix the Gaul, Dr Dee — rubbed shoulders with those still very much with us — Anthony Weiner, Donald Trump, Boris Johnson. There were borrowings from
In Competition No. 3071 you were invited to supply a demotivational poem. This was your opportunity to come up with a bracing antidote to the world-view peddled by an eye-wateringly lucrative self-help industry that feeds on a mix of insecurity and the aspirational narcissism du jour. You came at the challenge from various
In Competition No. 3070 you were invited to provide a poem with the title ‘When I Grow Up I Want to Be [insert name here]’. Performance poet Megan Beech was so incensed by the abuse heaped by Twitter trolls on her idol Mary Beard that she wrote a poem called ‘When I Grow Up
In Competition No. 3069 you were invited to provide a spoof version of the song ‘My Favourite Things’ for the constituency/demographic of your choice. I decided to set this comp after stumbling across the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic recast as it might have been sung by an elderly Julie Andrews (‘Maalox and nose drops and
In Competition No. 3068 you were invited to provide a sonnet in reverse, using as your model Rupert Brooke’s ‘Sonnet Reversed’, which turns upside-down both the form — it begins on the rhyming couplet — and the Petrarchan concept of idealised love, starting on a romantic high but ending in prosaic banality. This challenge
In Competition No. 3067 you were invited to provide a tale of travel misery on behalf of a well-known traveller from the fields of fact or fiction. The seed of this assignment was a column in the Observer called My Crap Holiday, which invited readers to share travel horrors: inclement weather, devil children, oven-like
In Competition No. 3066 you were invited to submit an ode to a piece of sporting equipment. There is a long and distinguished tradition of verse inspired by sport, going all the way back to Pindar’s odes celebrating ancient Greek athletic achievement. (As London mayor, Boris Johnson commissioned a poem in the style of Pindar
In Competition No. 3065 you were invited to supply a happy ending for a well-known play, poem or novel. Nahum Tate (the worst poet laureate ‘if he had not succeeded Shadwell’, according to Robert Southey) gave King Lear a cheery ending: Lear regains his throne, Cordelia marries Edgar, and Edgar joyfully declares that ‘truth
In Competition No. 3064 you were invited to supply a newspaper leading article exposing the hitherto unsuspected corrupting influence of a seemingly innocuous everyday item. This assignment was inspired by the revelation, in a recent letter to the Times, that patent leather shoes were outlawed at a British girls’ public school as recently as the
In Competition No. 3063 you were invited to submit a poem about puns containing puns. Dryden regarded paronomasia as ‘the lowest and most grovelling kind of wit’; Samuel Johnson took an equally dim view. But this most derided form of humour produced a witty and accomplished entry that elicited only the occasional groan.
In Competition No. 3062 you were invited to submit a Shakespearean-style soliloquy that a contemporary politician might have felt moved to deliver. Inspiration for this comp came from Aryeh Cohen-Wade’s imagining, in the New Yorker, of Donald Trump performing Shakespearean soliloquies: ‘Listen — to be, not to be, this is a tough question, OK?
In Competition No. 3061 you were invited to imagine a well-known author who doesn’t normally write in the genre having a go at science fiction and submit an extract from the resulting work. In a 2015 interview, Ursula K. Le Guin, always a staunch and eloquent defender of the genre, took a pop at writers
In Competition No. 3060 you were invited to provide an updated version of ‘Jerusalem’ starting with the words ‘And did those tweets…’One of my favourite parodies of Blake’s poem is by Allan M. Laing. In it he describes the wartime blackouts: Bring me my torch of waning power! Bring me my phosphor button bright!
In Competition No. 3059 you were invited to supply a poem inspired by the periodic table. The writer and chemist Primo Levi saw poetry in Mendeleev’s system for classifying the chemical elements, describing it as ‘poetry, loftier and more solemn than all the poetry we had swallowed down in liceo; and come to think of
In Competition No. 3058 you were invited to supply snippets of mischievously/sadistically misleading advice for foreign tourists visiting Britain, or for British ones travelling abroad. This is an assignment that you always embrace with relish, though one competitor observed that it felt curiously difficult this time round because ‘the interaction between Britain and Abroad isn’t
In Competition No. 3057 you were invited to submit a short story entitled ‘The day the internet died’. Phyllis Reinhard’s Don McLean-inspired entry stretched the definition of short story rather but was entertaining nonetheless: ‘Bye, bye Mister Trump’s tweeting lies/ Instagram’s nude shots of Kimmy and her plastic backside…’ John O’Byrne was good too
In Competition No. 3056 you were invited to submit an elegy on the death of the High Street. Your entries were poignant and clever, and transported me back to teenage Saturdays frittered away in the likes of Dolcis, Lilly & Skinner and Freeman, Hardy & Willis. John Morrison’s lines ‘Oh Amazon how swift you
In Competition No. 3055 you were invited to take a well-known figure on the world stage, living or dead, and cast them in the role of agony aunt/uncle, submitting a problem of your invention and their solution. There is space only to high-five the winners below, who take £25 each. Bill Greenwell gets £30.