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If, like me, you are allergic to pantomime (‘Oh, no you’re not!’; ‘Oh, yes I am!’) then help is at hand: the Gruffalo is in town and strutting his stuff, to the delight of legions of tiny fans, at the Lyric, Shaftesbury Avenue until 12 January. Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler’s much-loved verse fable tells
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Spectator literary competition No. 2829 Peter Porter called Hull ‘the most poetic city in England’ but would Philip Larkin have agreed? What would he have made of his adopted home city being named 2017’s City of Culture? Answers, please, in verse of up to 16 lines, to be emailed to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 1
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In Competition 2826 you were invited to submit nonsense verse on a wintry theme. The line between sense and nonsense is a blurred one; certainly Carroll’s crazy world has a bonkers internal logic all of its own. But perhaps the best way into nonsense is to put the quest for sense aside for once and
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Spectator literary competition No. 2828 As the New Year hurtles towards us, it’s time for a retrospective commentary, in verse, on 2013. Please email entries of up to 16 lines to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 9 December (the shorter deadline is because of our seasonal production schedule). The recent competition to supply a poem for
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In Competition 2825 you were invited to supply a poem for a well-known painting of your choice. The poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti was the inspiration behind this challenge. His sonnet ‘Found’ was written in 1881 as a companion to an unfinished oil painting of the same title on the theme of prostitution, which
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Spectator literary competition No. 2827 It’s time for a seasonal challenge: let’s have a Christmas list, in verse, written in the style of the poet of your choice. Entries of up to 16 lines should be emailed to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 2 December. The recent assignment in which competitors were asked to supply double
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In Competition 2824 you were invited to submit double clerihews about a well-known sporting figure past or present. The clerihew was invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley as a bored schoolboy. His son Nicolas subsequently came up with the double clerihew and trebles have been recorded. Other noted practitioners include Chesterton and Auden — and,
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Our competition this week invites you to submit nonsense verse on a wintry theme. The line between sense and nonsense is a blurred one. In his Spectator review of Geoffrey Grigson’s Faber anthology of nonsense verse, Anthony Burgess encapsulated this nicely, noting that Mr Grigson ‘wisely evades, in his preface, anything like a definition of nonsense. He
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In Competition 2823 you were invited to submit a school essay or poem written at the age of eight by a well-known person, living or dead, entitled ‘My Pet’ . Those of you who chose to step into the childhood shoes of well-known writers faced the tricky challenge of pulling off an element of pastiche
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In Competition 2822 you were invited to submit an extract from a scene from a contemporary soap opera (television or radio) as Shakespeare might have written it. The idea of filtering an aspect of popular culture through the lens of the Bard for comic effect is not a new one, of course. A recent example
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Spectator literary competition No. 2824 You are invited to submit a double clerihew about a well-known sporting figure, past or present. The rules governing a clerihew are well set out in its Wikipedia entry but here are some additional pointers from the poet James Michie, a master of the form, who regularly contributed clerihews to The
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In Competition 2821 you were invited to supply a poem that provides instruction or useful information. This challenge was, of course, a nod to Virgil, whose Georgics, a didactic poem spanning four books, is part agricultural manual, part political poem. Although it was published way back in 29 bc or thereabouts, its lessons can still
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As Sunday night’s storm clouds gathered, one of rock’s great polymath-storytellers whipped up a tempest of his own on the stage of the Hammersmith Apollo with the help of his six compadres. Sharp-suited and spivvy, Nick Cave howled and crooned his way through songs of death, sex, savagery and deviancy interspersed with love ballads of
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Spectator literary competition No. 2823 This week’s assignment offers an opportunity to put yourselves into the 8-year-old shoes of future heads of state or literary giants. You are invited to submit a school essay or poem written at the age of eight by any well-known person, living or dead, entitled ‘My Pet’. Please email entries,
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In Competition 2820 you were invited to supply a postscript to any well-known novel. This challenge was suggested by a reader who drew my attention to Barbara Hardy’s neo-Victorian gem Dorothea’s Daughter and Other Nineteenth Century Postscripts, which includes afterwords to Little Dorrit and Mansfield Park. I hoped it might appeal to anyone who
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Spectator literary competition No. 2822 This week’s challenge is to submit an extract from a scene from a contemporary soap opera (TV or radio) as Shakespeare might have written it. Please email entries, of up to 16 lines, to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 30 October. Here are the results of this week’s challenge, in which competitors were
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In Competition 2819 you were invited to write a poem either in free verse mocking rhymed, metrical verse or in conventional verse mocking free verse. Auden was no fan of vers libre: ‘If one plays a game, one needs rules, otherwise there is no fun.’ (D.H. Lawrence, he felt, was one of the few
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Spectator literary competition No. 2821 Following in the footsteps of Virgil This week, in a challenge inspired by Virgil’s Georgics, you are invited to supply a poem that provides instruction or useful information. The Georgics, a didactic poem that spans four books, is part agricultural manual, part political poem. Although it was published way back
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In Competition 2818 you were asked to merge two literary classics and provide a synopsis of the new title. You obviously had great fun with this one. Frank Osen came up with Pollyanna Karenina: ‘A girl from New England is so relentlessly upbeat about her affair with a Russian aristocrat that he throws himself under
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Spectator literary competition No. 2820 Barbara Hardy’s Dorothea’s Daughter and Other Nineteenth Century Postscripts is a collection of short stories in which Professor Hardy imagines significant conversations between characters some time after their novel has ended. These postscripts enter into dialogue with the original narratives by developing suggestions in the text rather than changing the
