Book Review Competition 2025: The Results

Recently, our popular review blog, Everybody’s Reviewing, passed half a million readers. To celebrate this milestone, Everybody’s Reviewing and the Centre for New Writing ran a book review competition. The competition was open to all undergraduate and postgraduate students in the School of Arts, Media & Communication at the University of Leicester. You can read more about it here. 

The standard of entries was very high indeed - every entry we received was professional, well-written and eminently publishable. Results of the competition are below. First prize is £100 in gift vouchers. There are also two second prizes of £25 each in vouchers, plus three "Honourable Mentions." All winning entries will be published on Everybody's Reviewing over the next week or so. Congratulations to everyone involved!

Results

1st Prize: Lee Wright, for his review of On Agoraphobia, by Graham Caveney

Runner-Up: Mellissa Flowerdew-Clarke, for her review of The Book of Guilt, by Catherine Chidgey

Runner-Up: Iain Minney, for his review of The Day of the Triffids, by John Wyndham

Honourable Mention: Wiktoria Borkowska, for her review of I Who Have Never Known Men, by Jacqueline Harpman

Honourable Mention: Kathy Hoyle, for her review of Cuddy, by Benjamin Myers

Honourable Mention: Kimaya Patil, for her review of Fourth Wing, by Rebecca Yarros

Book Review Competition 2025: Call for Entries!

Recently, our popular review blog, Everybody’s Reviewing, passed half a million readers. To celebrate this milestone, Everybody’s Reviewing and the Centre for New Writing are running a book review competition. 

The competition is open to all undergraduate and postgraduate students in the School of Arts, Media & Communication at the University of Leicester. First prize is £100 in Amazon gift vouchers. There will also be two second prizes of £25 each in vouchers. All entries will be considered for publication on the website. 

All you have to do is write a short book review (200-400 words) of a book you’ve read recently and enjoyed. The review should be positive overall. The book you choose doesn’t have to be new: it can be any work of fiction, creative non-fiction or poetry from any time, by any author. Please include a short (2-line) biography of yourself at the end of the review. 

Please send your entries (no more than one per student) to this email address: everybodysreviewing@gmail.com. You can also use the same email address for any queries you have about the competition. 

The deadline for submissions is 9am on Monday 23 June 2025. 

The Joe Orton Creative Writing Competition 2024

 

The School of Arts, Media and Communication at the University of Leicester runs an annual Joe Orton Creative Writing Competition that invites A-Level students to write an Edna Welthorpe letter.

"Edna Welthorpe" was the persona that Orton invented to satirise the values he abjured - middle-class, middlebrow, conservative. Through Edna's letters of complaint (or praise), Orton lampooned social and sexual convention. 

Below, the 2024 winner, Mona Bacon (Brighton, Hove & Sussex Sixth Form College) reflects on her experience of the competition.

You can read Mona’s winning Edna Welthorpe letter here. Details about previous years' winners are on Creative Writing at Leicester here. Next year’s competition is already open – deadline: 30 June, 2025. Details are here. 

By Mona Bacon

Having previously only vaguely heard of Joe Orton, I was charmed by his playful approach to his characters when I read his plays. I particularly love the way he embraces the extremes and absurdity of the world he saw around him but avoids cruelty or personal insult in his prank letters, channelling his frustrations into humour.

As I recently started working part-time in retail, my entry into the competition was inspired by the somewhat ridiculous comments and complaints that many of the British public still generously employ. While the term "Aunt Edna" may have originally described theatre-goers of the 1950s, the entitled attitude of Edna Welthorpe is still no thing of the past.

This competition was a lovely way to get back into the Creative Writing I used to enjoy, reminding me that it can be silly as well as serious. I found the experience of writing from the perspective of someone so different from me incredibly freeing, and this has been a brilliant exercise in using tone and voice to create an interesting and engaging character.

While Edna’s abundance of self-entitlement is certainly excessive, I do think that small doses of this confidence can be a very helpful asset, and I hope to continue applying this to my writing and my own character. Perhaps, every once in a while, we should all be a little bit Edna Welthorpe.

"Nature, the Environment and Sustainability" Competition: Winning Entries 5

Over five days, we're delighted to be publishing the winning entries from the short story competition, "Nature, the Environment and Sustainability," which ran in 2023-4. The competition, commissioned by the University of Leicester’s Centre for New Writing and Centre for Environmental Health and Sustainability, was judged by the celebrated nature writer, Mark Cocker, and showcased at this year’s Literary Leicester free literature festival.

You can see the results here. There were two winners, one specially commended entry, and two runners-up. Each day, we've been publishing one of these winning entries. Today, you can read one the two winning stories, "Flood" by Sophie Sparham. 

Sophie Sparham is a writer from Derby. She has written commissions for BBC Radio 4, The V&A and The People’s History Museum. Sophie co-hosts the poetry night "Word Wise" which won Best Spoken Word Night at the 2019 Saboteur Awards.

Flood

It came and went as Kingfishers always do, a vibrant flash of blue, gone in an instant. I was at work when I got the call: drive my car through young torrents and leave it at the top of the valley. There, at the dulling edge of twilight, I parked by a pub, trudged down fields thick with new mud, cow and sheep shit. The fields below were gone, in their place a sky had been cut into the landscape, wavering in the breeze. Eons of deep blue stretching beyond the borders of the farms. The track leading to the house had disappeared, in its place, a river. I lowered myself in, the water climbing my jeans, veins of wanting. Blue on blue, backwards waterfall, weighing down my clothes. My legged pressed against the current; a different kind of gravity, a moving landscape, dragging at my sides.  

It arrived uninvited, lapping against the front door as we sat in the cool of the dining room, the air thick with laughter and the steam of freshly cooked stew. The paint, eroding slowly like a cliff edge, flaked from the walls, as we served pumpkins and sweet chestnuts, all grown and foraged from our land. No one mentioned the dirt under our nails, the ache in our backs from lugging thick sandbags across gravel. No one cried out about faith or science. The sheep had been herded to high ground, the motorbikes ridden in wellies to a place where the land-locked tide could not touch them. The cooker, fridge and sofa balanced on industrial bricks, black as coal. And we sat and drank tea and waited. 

I thought of my childhood home, my father brushing away the water that dared approach our house. The way my parents removed the swallow’s nest from above their door and poisoned the mice that had the nerve to enter the garage. They taught me nature was something to be pushed away, something other. But here, I’d learnt to live with the seasons. To let go of winter’s leaves, to study patterns of frost and fell trees into fire. Here, I let the evergreen needles fall and witnessed the arrivals of catkins, ash keys and buds. Here, I listened for the call of the chiffchaff in April, the cry of the buzzard, the croak of the raven. I walked in bluebells and wildflowers and the precise silence only beech woods can hold. I welcomed the family of bees who moved into the slates of my roof, to let them live. Each night, I’d hear them beating their wings in unison, metres away from my head. I used to fear bees, but night after night, I'd listen eagerly, amazed until they hummed me to sleep. Why should the flood be any different? Like autumn in all its golds, this too is a miracle. The way water can reclaim a landscape in liquid pause. The way it holds us still.    

We left the dishes in the sink and ventured outside to stand in the garden. The grass danced differently underwater, the strands bending in slow motion beneath the light of headtorches. The green reminded me of spring, when everything felt new born. The neon leaves of woodlands, the way their colour yelled at bark and soil. Owls screeched as we smoked fags down to the filter and discussed where constellations might be behind maps of obscuring cloud. There was a calmness, listening to the rain against the corrugated roof while the rising tide baptised our floor. Some of us stayed awake, as water climbed gurling up their drains, meeting it with rags and mops. You and I slept, tangled like pond weed, dreamt of oceans, the deluge kissing the kitchen tiles below. 

The following day, you penned a mark on the wall, added a date to the height. I remarked at how much it had grown; each year a few inches taller. My friend left the same marks on her kitchen wall to measure her growing toddler. Each time I visited the house, he would show me his progress and smile. Years ago, it had reached the first floor. I wondered if anyone was else was thinking about this as we paddled through the vegetable patch and watched plant pots float into the distance. Waders called to one another. I could see them, two swans and a great egret, in the field beyond the drystone wall. Curious bullocks tried to approach their new neighbours, as a kingfisher dived for newly displaced fish. When I sat inside, and stared out beyond the large glass window, it made me feel like I was on a boat, journeying downstream. Part of me wanted to stay, to live in a world dictated by new streams and seas. To walk sky after sky, flying as the fish did between countries redrawn. 

By lunch, it was gone from the buildings, leaving only silt and patterns of dirt behind. We emptied the house to its slick bones, blasted music from tinny speakers and bathed it like a child; slowly, tender, in warm, soapy water. I watched the bubbles wash over my skin, the colour slowly changing to beige then chocolate and finally deep brown. When my bucket was more dirt than water, I threw it into the undergrowth, watched by an onlooking robin, then returned to the shower, which I'd been using as my filling station. The water severed us from the world, and would do for a few more days. I didn’t mind. I soon forgot about my phone, the emails I had to write. Now there was only me and this sponge, thoughts unbroken by tomorrow. I cleaned each drawer separately, christened the living room table, praised the bags of oats and lentils. I mopped the floor three times, removing layer upon layer of river, peeling back the months of dirt that the passage of life had created. 

I knew a poet who was scared of the countryside. He told me everything here was so uncertain, that there were too many things that could go wrong. He said that I lived in Mary Oliver country. To me, the city is far more unpredictable, its rhythms of chaos and charge, its edges so sure of themselves.

My friends often ask why I live where I live. We know the waters will come again; that the river will leave the implied safety of its banks and dance with the dirt. They talk about it as though it’s the cause of the problem. As though we haven’t pulled up the trees, or created miles upon miles of agricultural landscape. Rivers are migratory creatures; it’s us who pretend we have tamed them into stillness, who have sculpted the world to our needs and expected no consequences. 

There are days when we go out onto the field with coffee and sit beneath the collapsing canopy in the dew. You point out the sparrowhawk as the mist rises. The hay bales we bought for summer are sprouting now, green shoots bursting through mustard yellow. Once, on one of our circular navigations around the field, we saw a pile of bright colours in the distance. I cursed beneath my breath, thinking of the teenagers with the tiny motorcross bike the night before; the way they had marveled at my Royal Enfield. They’d asked me if was ok to stay on our land and I had told them yes, shooing away the police. Now I felt my judgement to be misguided, looking at the mess that had been left behind, the remains of a party which I hadn’t been part of. As we approached the mound, I saw the bright white of a PVA bottle, the red and yellow Kodak logo, brown glass stripped of its label, a wide hole in the grass. This had nothing to do with wayward youth; it was the start of a new badger set, burrowed into the landfill that hides beneath these fields. The only reason we were able to buy this land was due to its toxicity, the abandoned relics, untarnished by time. It amazes me how quickly it can all change. In the summer, this field is a flurry of butterflies, crickets and bees. Now, the trees are golden and circles of mushrooms glisten in circles below boots. I like to stand beneath the copper beech and try and catch the falling bronze, stare at the canoe full of rain water and know that we didn’t have to use it. Not this time. 

Sometimes, on calmer days, it is our turn to visit the river. We take off our clothes, jump into freezing currents and scream as feet brush against fallen trees claimed by the rushing gloom. When the sky was cloudless, we blew up the blue mattress and paddled downstream with oars. You told me you couldn’t swim, that you were scared of fish, and I laughed at how ridiculous it all was. It’s hard to explain this world. The joy it brings.  

My friends tell me the water is coming and all I can say is, thank god, thank god.

"Nature, the Environment and Sustainability" Competition: Winning Entries 4

Over five days, we're delighted to be publishing the winning entries from the short story competition, "Nature, the Environment and Sustainability," which ran in 2023-4. The competition, commissioned by the University of Leicester’s Centre for New Writing and Centre for Environmental Health and Sustainability, was judged by the celebrated nature writer, Mark Cocker, and showcased at this year’s Literary Leicester free literature festival.

You can see the results here. There were two winners, one specially commended entry, and two runners-up. Each day, we're publishing one of these winning entries. Today, you can read one of the two winning stories, "The Fog Harvesters," by Lee Wright.

Lee Wright is a naturalist and cinephile. He is currently working towards a PhD researching memoir and film’s relationship to reality. 

The Fog Harvesters

Bekele and his wife Kidist spend their nights in the forest, high in the mountains of central Kenya. They collect water from the trees, carry the yellow plastic jerrycans to their home, put empty ones back out. Bekele looks at Kidist, shadowed by a towering tree as she pins a plastic sheet made from discarded packaging to the bark. Together they wait for the fog to come and the water to form on the tree. Bekele can almost hear the moisture as it slowly rolls down the trunk, onto the plastic and into the jerrycan. The night cools and Bekele pulls on his wool hat, zips up his old fleece. Kidist gives the jerrycan a little kick with the toe of her rubber boot, ‘We need the trees to cry,’ she says.

It was Kidist who taught Bekele about the fog, how the forest heats up during the day, causing the moisture to evaporate into the air, and how the moisture condenses in the cool night. She puts a finger to the bark and wets her lips with a water droplet.

‘We must have tears,’ she says.

As a boy, Bekele watched his mother and father struggle to bring enough water to their home. The rainy season often failed them. Kidist tests the plastic sheet and moves on to the next tree. Bekele has seen the rivers drying up, remembers the feeling of his mother’s dried lips when she kissed him goodnight. The droughts have followed him into adulthood. It is a curse that Kidist is trying to lift. Drought is the war they both fight. Collecting the fog and dew has been handed down through Kidist’s family for generations, her parents would use banana leaves and metal pots. Bekele’s arms are shaky from carrying the jerrycans, which seem to sprout from the trees like roots. Nothing exists without water. The fog keeps Bekele, Kidist and their cow alive. In their small house, Kidist will boil the water and give her husband a cup and they will wearily toast another successful night of harvesting, while batting away the insects, sending them reeling.  Sometimes they wash one another in the tears from the trees. Bekele pours a jug over his wife’s shoulders and kisses her skin.

From the house, Bekele often watches Kidist whisper into the ear of their cow she named Nuru, after the daughter they lost. Their one and only child. His wife will take a break each day to whisper something to Nuru. He never asks what it is she whispers. Perhaps she is promising more water? Nuru recognises Kidist every time. Once a week Kidist will go to their daughter’s resting place and not return from the small grave until it is time to harvest the fog. When his wife is sad, Bekele feels like a chained-up dog, unable to do anything good for her. 

Kidist says the best sound is that of the water sloshing back and forth as they carry the jerrycans and she is right. The best feeling is when she wriggles her toes in the water when they have enough of it to bathe in. Before Bekele harnessed the fog from the trees, he would walk three miles along the dirt roads with his mother to a school where there was a water tap. Bekele would close his eyes and run his hand over the corrugated steel of the school’s structure as they waited their turn at the tap. Inside the school was a bird in a metal cage. He noticed the way the bird would watch as the people stood in line. His mother would say that his deceased grandmother was the bird. Look, Bekele, she is watching you, she is watching, and she hears when you complain. She is grinning away at her grandchild. See the movement of her head? And Bekele would stand, his feet in a dust cloud. He wondered if the bird ever sang, would it be a sorrow song? He never thought it was just a lie. He thinks of that bird when the fog is moved by the wind. He will never forget how his family would spend entire days thirsty, how his father sometimes writhed with agony. His father always ached. He wishes that his mother was here. He would say, listen how the night is full of crying trees. He would show her how the fog comes and wipes away their thirst.

‘There are places in this world where you can stand and be totally at peace,’ Kidist says.

Above her, the branches bend towards and away from each other. Bekele looks at his cracked knuckles – his father’s knuckles. The trees follow one another. In the village, some of the people sleep. Kidist has her eye on the damp bark. The jerrycans gradually fill, a good night for fog, but there is no applause. Bekele moves between the trees, his head going down a little with tiredness. No one, he thinks, will be able to find them amongst these trees, too tall to see over. As the fog crawls, he feels restored, taken out of himself. He counts the trees like he counts his blessings. As far as Bekele is concerned, they have no choice. Harvest the fog or die, and he has never much fancied dying. The trees seem to grow taller every night. It makes him feel almost safe. Almost. In the fog, Bekele’s breathing becomes calm. The water is on its way. Bekele rubs at his thin chest as he walks through the dark. Kidist shouts at him to come, two jerrycans are ready. Bekele takes hold, one in each hand.

‘You go,’ Kidist says.

Bekele can hear the rhythmic slosh of the water as he heads for home. He is fulfilling his mother’s destiny. He forgets the discomfort, thinks of nothing but endless water. Tomorrow he will wash. It will be good to feel clean. At the house he investigates the piece of mirror Kidist keeps bedside their mattress. Bekele feels sure he will see the face of his father. He hopes to meet his parents again in the afterlife, where he will tell them about the fog and the trees. He looks at his dirty fleece. Twelve years he has had this one fleece. He stares hard at himself. At the narrow scar on his throat. He cannot help wishing he was rich. Somewhere nearby a child is wailing. He can’t remember the sound Nuru made when she cried. He takes a drop of un-boiled water from a jerrycan, hears again the wailing child. Bekele wants to sit down and close his eyes, but he rolls up both sleeves and walks back to the forest. Kidist is hoping the fog will be heavy tonight. There is no way of knowing now if the fog will be enough. They move together, checking jerrycan after jerrycan. Kidist has never been frightened of the forest at night. She sometimes mocks Bekele for his fear. There is only one thing that frightens his wife and that is not having enough water.

‘You’re quiet,’ she says.

‘I am remembering my mother,’ Bekele says.

Kidist considers this for a second. She moves close to her husband, puts her hand in his. He kisses her on the head, and she stands back, nods. He can see her kindness. He also sees the possibility of a waterless future for them. He is trying to piece together what might happen if the fog one night vanishes and never returns. To think they will have to again walk so far just for water. On some nights, the fog is nothing. Bekele and Kidist flit from shadow to shadow, touching the bark. Some trees have bark like sharp teeth, though the trees have never drawn blood from Kidist or Bekele. Their eyes got used to the darkness long ago, but they still move carefully, giddy for the mist. Bekele imagines what it would be like to leap into the ocean. He would be foolish at first. Go in too deep and stay in too long until the water had softened his skin. He will never see so much water. They collect the moisture to help not just themselves, but those who cannot make it to the forest and whose mouths are dry. Kidist watches the plastic sheets attentively. Bekele can see her eyes. Her hands move to the tree, several times she taps the bark, nodding her head. All they can do now is wait. Bekele clears his throat. Long stretches of waiting.

‘I should have been born a tree,’ Kidist says.

Bekele keeps his hands by his sides.

‘Then you would live a long time,’ he says.

The moonlight cools Bekele’s face. It sits on his heart. Ignites his lungs. The trees are giants, who stand great and still. The forest, Bekele, and Kidist are determined to live and live and live.

‘The fog will come,’ she tells him, ‘It will come. All we have to do is wait.’

"Nature, the Environment and Sustainability" Competition: Winning Entries 3

Over five days, we're delighted to be publishing the winning entries from the short story competition, "Nature, the Environment and Sustainability," which ran in 2023-4. The competition, commissioned by the University of Leicester’s Centre for New Writing and Centre for Environmental Health and Sustainability was judged by the celebrated nature writer, Mark Cocker, and showcased at this year’s Literary Leicester free literature festival.

You can see the results here. There were two winners, one specially commended entry, and two runners-up. Each day, we're publishing one of these winning entries. Today, you can read the specially commended story "Before the Grasses," by Alice Newitt.

Alice Newitt is a Physics graduate who currently works for the University of Leicester's careers service. She has a passion for hopeful and imaginative literature.

Before the Grasses

or the musings of an immortal being waiting for the world to end

Before the grasses, there were ferns. They would brush against my legs as I walked across the plains, moss squidgy beneath my toes. When I came across a cliff edge or a great basin waiting to be filled, I would do like one of the living creatures and creep around the edge, as if I wasn’t a friend of Death but instead afraid of her.

The others used to laugh. 

‘What do you even do?’ they would ask me. ‘You aren’t the sun or the moon. You don’t reroute rivers or hang the stars. You don’t create life or take it away - you just wander through these valleys and hills, getting in everybody’s way.’

But they never could understand. I was here long before they were, I was here at the start and I am still here at the end, and so I turned away from them and turned towards the world. 

*

Like the Earth, I was forged in fire. I watched as the moon was formed from the ring of rocks surrounding the Earth, and at first it was so close that I could reach out and touch it, my arms stretching out for tens of thousands of miles just to feel the touch of another celestial body. The Earth itself was spinning so fast that I would straddle it and shriek in delight for millennia. One time, I stretched right out and touched the sun, just for fun. The plasma dripped off my finger like dew. I spent a thousand years letting meteorites prickle my back, the ground beneath me hardening like plaster, water starting to pool around my feet. I let the moon drag me across the seas on its tides. 

As the Earth’s rotation slowed, I took refuge on an island, lava warming my thighs. A meteorite landed in my hair. I picked it out and licked it. I ran across cooling rocks so quickly that I could scarcely feel them at all, and then I dived into the newly pooling ocean and let the water soak through my pores.

This was all thousands of millions of years ago.

*

I’d first noticed the emergence of life when I’d taken a gulp out of my favourite sea and noticed that it had a new taste.

‘That will have been the oxygen,’ Life would tell me later once he had finally crawled out of the ocean. ‘It is what allows all of this to be.’ 

That was Life all over – by ‘all of this,’ he meant only the breathing things, not the rocks or the fire or the ocean, as if only life is alive, as if the Earth’s surface had never ripped apart and continents never spread like syrup. I was there when he first climbed out of the primordial soup, all gloopy and gunky and even then, he had thought that he had known everything about everything, telling me what I was and what I wasn’t, as if I’d been waiting for him all this time. 

But I still loved him. Together, we rode tectonic plates until we grew dizzy, and the days were long, so long, sometimes twenty-two hours or more. I would show him things that he would never think to notice and in return he would show me his creations – spongy archaeocyathids, trilobites crawling over my waist, algae caking the seafloor. The sea levels rose and the summers were balmy and I used to stretch my hands out and cry out in delight at it all. 

‘What do you call this?’ I asked him. 

‘The Cambrian explosion,’ he told me. 

*

Time only goes forward, and as the Earth spun ever more quickly, Life pontificated and life proliferated: great trees soaring upwards; ferns spreading outwards and then the grasses, and the creatures: a hominid standing erect, a dolphin plunging through the waves. 

And then it was a morning late in the Holocene, some four billion years since Life had first come along, and, for some decades, we had been sitting on a hillside watching the settlement in the valley down below us crawl and sprawl. I lifted a hand to allow the hominids to install a cable car tower beside us. I watched Life gaze numbly at the scars in the forest and saw that it would soon be time for him to leave. 

‘Stay a little longer,’ I asked him. 

‘It’s not my choice,’ he said, and I believed him. The humans were barely in their adolescence and the dark side of the globe sparkled like starlight. He would have stayed if he could. There was glacial meltwater rushing down the mountainsides and the air was growing ashy. There was a fire coming, and there was little left for he and I to do. 

*

For a century and an afternoon, I stayed in the valley. Life drifted between me and the world, but I mostly just lay there, watching the smoke-filled sky, and thought of a time long ago, back before Life left the ocean, back to when the Earth was covered in ice, the whole planet white. I would try and outrun the encroaching night, snow crunching beneath my feet as I chased across the Earth’s surface. I hadn’t known that there was anything to miss. 

The others had laughed. 

‘And so it has been decided, Earth,’ they told me. ‘You shall end in ice.’ 

‘I am not Earth,’ I reminded them.  ‘I am the witness, and I shall watch the Earth, whether it ends in fire or ice or those things in-between. I was here when the Earth was created and I will be here when it ends, and I know that no matter what, I shall always be here. Amongst them.’ 

They listened to me, and then laughed and turned away again, and I knew that it was no good. They never would understand. 

*

The forest was still burning; I witnessed it as I was lying there in that burning valley. I observed it and I did nothing. I just lay there and felt the heat of the fire and the spray of the water and tried to imagine that I was still skating on Snowball Earth, or else amongst the ferns of the late Devonian, so green and so verdant. 

‘Excuse me, ma’am.’ 

There was a hominid looking down at me. He was one of the ones here to put out the fire - I could tell by the hat and boots. He’d never succeed, and, as I glanced down at his ruined torso, I saw that in fact he had already lost. I looked at his outstretched hand. 

‘She’ll be along soon,’ I told him, meaning Death. ‘She’s just busy someplace else.’ 

‘You can’t stay here,’ he told me. 

‘It won’t burn me. I was forged in fire.’

But he didn’t move, just stayed standing there, with his hand outstretched. How could they not know me, I wondered as I looked up at this one. How could they not know me after all this time?

‘This isn’t the first mass extinction event that I’ve seen.’ I told him. ‘It’s nothing personal - I didn’t save any of the others either, not even the wattieza trees or psaronius ferns. I watched as they died and I did nothing at all.’ 

He continued to stand there.

‘I’d get moving if I were you,’ I said. ‘Maybe if you go quickly, Death won’t find you. Perhaps if you run, you could outrun her, outrun the Earth, but it wouldn’t make much difference. You’ll all be gone soon, making space for whatever comes next.’ Will there be anything next, I wondered, once Life is gone? And then I almost smiled to myself, because that was a Life-like way of thinking – to be unable to imagine a future without itself. But I didn’t smile, I just lay there and gazed up at this hominid’s outstretched hand. It made no difference. I had let all of the others die.

‘I’m not who you are looking for,’ I told him. ‘I cannot save you.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘I’m here to save you.’ 

I listened to his words, and then watched as he died. Oh, Life. You knew everything and you knew nothing at all. 

*

I saw out the remainder of Earth’s time alone, a million years at a time, and now finally I sit here, alone on this hillside, waiting for the sun to go out and extinguish a world that I have seen die over and over. 

Nobody likes a witness, that was something that I had discovered early on. No one likes the one who watches, nobody cares for the bystander who sees it all and lets it happen. But as I look at the Earth now, I understand why it needed me. All its inhabitants’ lives were so short. They could scarcely comprehend the rise and fall of their own civilisations, never mind the rise and fall of their species. I have been here to watch the Earth through all its triumphs and disasters. I was put here to see all of it, for what would be the point of it, if there were nobody to observe it? And so I watch it still, waiting for the end, and think of all the lifeforms that have lived and died, of the ice and snow, the leafy Devonian, of the hominids and their creations, of the fires before and after. 

‘You can’t feel sadness,’ Life had told me, the day that I saw the last tree fall.

‘I know,’ I told him, but sometimes I felt as if I did. Sometimes I felt that I could drown the Earth. 

The sky is turning red, and now black, here in this final second in which the Earth exists, before the second in which it will not.

‘What will happen, do you think?’ Life had once asked me. ‘Once all of this is done?’

‘I don’t know what will come after,’ I said. ‘But I know how it will end. You will be one of the first to go: created over millions of years, blown out in an afternoon. The others will leave not long after, until at the end, it will be only me. Maybe, when this planet turns back to fire and dust, so will I. Or maybe I’ll be thrown far away, to some distant place, where I’ll fall to the ground and watch as the stars go out, one by one.’

‘How can you bear it?’ Life had asked, cowering from the bleakness of my vision.

‘Well, who knows?’ I told him, wanting, despite everything, to give him hope. And perhaps, in that moment, I needed hope too. ‘Maybe it won’t happen like that. Maybe the sun will burn forever. Maybe you will never leave. Maybe I am right, when I say that things will never go back to how they once were. But who knows: when all of this is done, when the Earth is gone and the sky is dark, maybe then, we will all go round again.’ 

"Nature, the Environment and Sustainability" Competition: Winning Entries 1

Over the next five days, we're delighted to be publishing the winning entries from the short story competition, "Nature, the Environment and Sustainability," which ran in 2023-4. The competition, commissioned by the University of Leicester’s Centre for New Writing and Centre for Environmental Health and Sustainability was judged by the celebrated nature writer, Mark Cocker, and showcased at this year’s Literary Leicester free literature festival.

You can see the results here. There were two winners, one specially commended entry, and two runners-up. Each day, we'll publish one of these winning entries. Today, you can read the story "If a forest," by one of two runners-up, Carol Rowntree Jones.

Carol Rowntree Jones writes poetry, essays and creative non-fiction, and is currently working on writing inspired by the National Forest. She is based in south Nottinghamshire.

If a forest

Once upon a time, there were seven men and one woman who worked at long tables in two rooms in a big house: each table had a wired telephone, and in the corner of each room was a fax machine and a kettle. 

Other people at other tables wrote of trees planted in the far north, planted to earn money in angular blocks with hard edges, in wet places drained to suit trees that did not like wet places. The seven men and one woman read of this and spread stiff paper maps over their large tables, smoothing them out with the edge of their hands. They dreamt of creating a forest where the trees would mean something to the people who planted them, where they would grow near and among the daily lives of these people. Their documents were labelled IF: what IF it were possible? what IF it happened? Over coffee they played with Scrabble tiles to find a name.

The heart of the country was known to contain many people and few trees. The seven men and the woman sent out notices throughout this vast band of ‘The Midlands,’ announcing their intention to create a forest, an invitation to compete for a forest ‘where you live.’ 

In these modern times, jousting for favour (and funding) had become campaigning, signing petitions, newspapers championing causes, local parishioners writing to MPs. Enthusiastic schoolteachers set up class projects entitled ‘What if a forest came to live here?’ Children drew pictures of round-topped trees and set brown and bright colourful birds on the branches where green leaves shimmered, the sun shone in the sky, and a happy squirrel scampered on the ground.

Few would envisage that the success of this forest would be so great that the corporeal descendants of this imagined squirrel would be severely ‘managed’ for loving the trees too much. In an ecstasy of sap, they would strip the young trees of their bark, wounding and opening them to disease, causing many to die.

An anonymous area between four famous cities, shaped as if a rectangular cloth was thrown down on the map and lay ruffled at the edges, began to draw the attention of the seven men and one woman. Here were hardly any trees. Here were many people. This was a landscape damaged by coal mines and clay pits that had worked these communities for more than two centuries. It was the end of these industries here, in this country, and many people were out of work. Even when they found new employment, the men would talk with regret and fondness of the camaraderie, the physical danger, how the light above was brighter when you’d been down the pit all day, how you had to account for the bullet the day you’d had to put the pit pony out of its pain when a stumble, or loose wagon, had broken its leg.

The women would tell you that the work might have been secure and lucrative, but they had 300 years’ worth of mining trauma in their family and they were glad no grandson of theirs would be going down the pit. They’d say how the washing on the line would be black before it was dry. How their husbands would have to stop the car to clean the windscreen after driving down the road by the big pit and the belt carrying the coal to be sorted. “When you’re in it you don’t really notice, but it was filthy. Grey dust, mud everywhere. And you’d never know when the shout would come; someone’s man injured.” 

So as the last pits were closing the women opened their hearts to the notion of forest. They wrote letters of support and sought out materials for the school projects. The local newspaper ran headlines, conducted interviews and polls, and wrote editorials putting the case This Area Needs The Forest Most.

And it probably did. 

It spoke to the core of what the team of eight dreamt of: a peopled landscape where trees would lead a magnificent transformation. Children would play in the shade of trees planted at their school, men and women would learn to plant, prune, forage, how to use a saw and a lathe, but mainly they would all be living in the breath of trees. The young trees would take up carbon as they grew and in maturity hold back water in heavy rain. Insects would creep in the bark and woodpeckers drill for them, small mammals would nest in the shelter of the woodland, and owls would scout them out. This forest would show how trees could heal both the scars in the land and the rift that had grown between people and nature.  

And it won. 

Everyone wanted to plant the first tree, any tree, in this brand-new forest. The local newspaper was not short of forest-related stories. A school has started to collect acorns to grow on windowsills. Women’s Institutes take on a quilting project to welcome the forthcoming woodlands. Money was allocated in special pots for people who owned land to say what they could offer this new forest: “See my plans! I will plant ten thousand trees, they will be native oak and ash, with rowan and hawthorn at the edges.” Of course, these were the days before the disaster of ash dieback had arrived in these lands. Because the intention was always to plant mixed woodlands there were few broad stands of ash as a singular species, to leave a stark scar of stricken naked stems when they died. The ash would quietly fail, and the oak, birch and thorn drop their seed and move into the space.

A landowner would say: “My new woodland will be threaded with silver birch and I will name it after my granddaughter. Children from her school will come and plant the first trees in the far field. Grant me the money and I will allow local people to come and walk over my land, they can learn about the birds that will live among the new trees – I will learn about the birds – and they can picnic and play and enjoy the views.”

The map makers had to find a new shade of green for land that was opened up to the people in this way and it swept over their maps in swathes. In later years there were occasional but regular disputes when the local people came with their dogs and with friends with their dogs. They would catch up and be chatting so much that they might not notice their dogs sniffing in the long grass, disturbing the nests on the ground, or shitting on the edge of the path where later that day a child might step. The tension this could create between people saying: “I’m only walking here," and the landowner saying: “Please don’t mistreat the land and the agreement I have made,” was, sadly, a variation of most disputes about land. I own it and you don’t. The maps and the money and enough goodwill generally ironed things out.  

From the beginning the people who held the funds to make this revolutionary forest happen knew it was important to consider carefully where the trees would be planted. One cold winter’s day, there was a child who travelled from one of the four cities that surrounded the forest, travelled from the city in a hired bus with classmates, to meet the foresters on a hill where several hundred trees had already been planted. The children and their teachers picked their way up the muddy field, but the trees were tiny and easy to tread on. The child, who had neither hat nor gloves and wore a thin blue anorak emblazoned ‘Foxes’, tried not to step on the trees and worked out that most of them were marked by a stick and guard supporting and surrounding them. The woman from the forest who walked with them explained that the trees were protected in this way from all the things that wanted to eat them - rabbit, vole, hare, deer. Foresters love few furry creatures. 

Laid on the ground were spades and bundles of slender young saplings wrapped in black bags against the wind. Oak with a few tattered leaves, hazel and small leaved lime. The foresters showed the children how to plant a tree: the size of the hole they should dig so that the fine, thirsty roots could be teased out and would fit with ease. They pointed out where the colour changed on the stem of the tree, the stem that would thicken to be called ‘trunk’, and to plant the tree deep enough so that this point of colour would be level with the ground when they’d finished. “Break up the soil and pile it back into the hole. It helps to do this in pairs. One to hold the tree, one to replace the soil carefully. Heel it in. Tread carefully with your boot to press the soil down. We want to squeeze out any empty spaces, so the roots won’t sit in pockets of icy water during this, their first winter out in the wild.”

The forester explained that the trees they were to plant that day were some of the many thousands that were added each year to this forest, and that the location of every tree and group of trees was chosen carefully. “For instance, we wouldn’t want to spoil the view from a site like this.” And the child from the city in the thin Foxes coat, with bare blue hands, said, “Sir, what’s a view?”

And there were students who came to the forest, from a big institution in the same city as the child’s school. One wore walking boots, one wore fashion boots and one wore white trainers. They came to make a film about this forest being created near where they were studying. They wanted to talk to people who had made the forest and about the difference the forest made.

The forester was talking about richness. How the trees flourished, and people walked amongst them in the spring and smelt the scent of the blossom, and in the autumn they gathered nuts and berries. That the trees produced firewood for the woodland owner to sell, who then planted more trees. How the trees would soon offer timber for furniture makers, and how children learnt and played here, and their teachers saw different children thrive. That the leaf fall each autumn made the forest floor richer and healthier and encouraged more insects and animals to make the woodland their home. “I don’t understand,” said one student, “what is ‘forest floor’? I’ve only heard the term ‘floor’ for carpet or dance.”

The people in the forest lived on farms or in villages but mostly in towns. There were four towns in this forest: one built on water, one built on fireclay, another built on history, markets and spa treatments. The fourth came into being because of, and was named for, the coal.

The town built on water was built on beer and brewing. The water ran hard. Tall warehouse buildings with many small-paned windows grew up along the riverbanks, the banks themselves reinforced with timber and iron. The warehouses were full of people, hops, sacking and mice. Outside, carts drawn by horses took the barrels to the buyers. The river, the canal and the railway took the beer to the ships setting sail for the whole world.

The skyline of the town built on fireclay was a stave rising and falling with the outlines of bottle kilns shaped like cones for the firing. This fireclay had special qualities and was formed into white sanitaryware, also sent across the world, supplied to keep the British Empire comfortable. Pipes, pots, chamber pots and kitchenware. 

A favourite mixing bowl might take you by surprise, might be found to have the mark of the town on the base, clay from the forest, purchased by a mother long ago and handed down. Made years before the forest was even begun, even thought to be necessary.

One solitary brick-built bottle kiln was saved, in this town surrounded by forest, and became known for its acoustics, when people sang songs about the clay in the past tense, and songs about the woodlands in present and future tenses.  

In the town built on history, therapeutic spa water would be brought in water wagons drawn by horses from the mines where it pooled, to the smart hotel in the town. Rich people bathed while miners sweated, each a few miles from the other. 

The town built on, built for, and named for the coal, had to find a new identity. The coal was only ever there because of trees that grew millennia ago: trees compressed into the ground, becoming coal, the coal extracted, the world turns and heats and now trees are planted again.

When the first potato farmer signed up to plant trees, it was a sign that the forest would happen. When the estate agents started to include in their fancy words ‘desirable, in the heart of the forest,’ the people knew that the area would thrive once more because of the trees.

Wildlife began to arrive. Diggers were working in a wet field surrounded by gravel pits and fast roads. They had made long shallow scrapes in the topsoil to attract water-loving birds and were packing up to leave. No sooner had they gone than two pairs of lapwing arrived, with their crest feather fascinators and iridescent wings, birds not seen here for over twenty years. This is how they learnt that nature is opportunistic. It does not need ‘beauty’, does not need chocolate-box perfection. Make it good enough and it will come. 

A man was dying. He was one of the first farmers to throw in his lot with the forest and years later he told his story. “Farmers do what pays off the loans. In the 70s we ripped out all the hedges, because we were paid to. The forest came along and offered us a new way to use our land. It’s the best thing we ever did. I never thought I’d see the trees grow but they did, the canopy is over our heads. I feel I’ve put a marker down that will never be removed. For the children round here, everything’s rosy. The forest is everything to me.”

A woman was walking. She had walked from her door to this café, in the heart of the forest. “I’ve hardly touched a road. I walked past the lake, glittering with birds, through woods which lead one to the other – the colours are glorious today! It’s uplifting. The forest has been the saviour of this place.”

This is what the seven men and one woman, long since retired by now, had known all along. 

The lichen started to gather.

"Nature, the Environment and Sustainability" Short Story Competition: Final Results

 

Photo: cocoparisienne @ Pixabay

The Centre for New Writing and Centre for Environmental Health and Sustainability and the are delighted to announce the winners and runners-up in the ‘Nature, the Environment & Sustainability’ Story Competition.

Joint Winners 
Lee Wright, ‘The Fog Harvesters’
Sophie Sparham, ‘Flood’

Specially Commended
Alice Newitt, ‘Before The Grasses Or The Musings Of An Immortal Being Waiting For The World To End’

Runners Up
Sam Dawson, ‘Cetiosaurus’
Carol Rowntree Jones, ‘If a Forest’
 
The judge, Mark Cocker, could not separate the top two, Sophie Sparham and Lee Wright, and we have split the winning prize. Each will receive £300 and be published in the next edition of the Leicester Literary Review. Mark also made a special commendation for Alice Newitt’s story, which is awarded £200. There are two further runners up, Carol Rowntree Jones and Sam Dawson, who receive £100 each. Runners up will be published on Creative Writing at Leicester.
 
Our winners and runners up will be presenting their work, alongside a reading and talk from our judge Mark Cocker, at a special competition celebration event at this year’s Literary Leicester festival on Thursday March 21st at 4pm. To book your free ticket, go the festival ticket site here. 
 
Congratulations to our winners and runners up, to our shortlistees who had the opportunity of a wonderfully inspiring masterclass with our judge, and well done to everyone who entered. The submissions were of truly excellent quality.

Prize-giving at Literary Leicester Festival

"Nature, the Environment & Sustainability" Short Story Competition: The Shortlist

 

Photo: cocoparisienne @ Pixabay

Over the last few months, the University of Leicester’s Centre for New Writing and Centre for Environmental Health and Sustainability have been jointly running a writing competition for East Midlands writers on the theme of "Nature, Environment, Sustainability." The competition was open for entries of fiction or creative non-fiction. You can read the original brief about the competition here. 

We are now delighted to announce the competition shortlist. These ten works will now be considered by our judge, Mark Cocker, and the winner and four runners-up will be announced on the 21st of February.

The competition team want to especially commend all who entered. There were so many very high quality submissions and it was a difficult choice.

Congratulations to our shortlistees:

Emma-Louise Howell, "I Wanted to Write a Poem About Climate Change"
Samuel Parr, "An Anthology of the Months when Nature Refused to Heal Me"
Lee Wright, "The Fog Harvesters"
Rae Toonery, "Cernunnos and the Girl Who Chased the Wind"
Sam Dawson, "Cetiosaurus"  
Asha Krishna, "Lost and Found"
Alice Newitt, "Before The Grasses, Or The Musings Of An Immortal Being Waiting For The World To End"
Molly Desorgher, "Silverlands"
Sophie Sparkhan, "Flood"
Carol Rowntree Jones, "If a Forest"
 

Joe Orton Creative Writing Competition 2023: The Results

The School of Arts at the University of Leicester runs an annual Joe Orton Creative Writing Competition that invites A-Level students to write an Edna Welthorpe letter. "Edna Welthorpe" was the persona that Orton invented to embody the values he abjured - middle-class, middlebrow, conservative. Through Edna's letters of complaint (or praise), Orton mocks social and sexual convention. 

The annual Joe Orton Creative Writing Competition is funded by a kind donation from Dame Vivienne Westwood.

You can read this year's two winning letters, by Hazel Morpurgo and Amelie Houseago, and the runner-up letter, by Chloe Howe, here. 

Below, Hazel Morpurgo talks about her writing processes, her experience of writing Edna Welthorpe (Mrs) letters, and her success in the Joe Orton Creative Writing Competition 2023. Congratulations to all the winners, and thanks to all the entrants! 

By Hazel Morpurgo

I first came across Joe Orton through A-Level English, in which we studied his 1965 play Loot. I learned about the Edna Welthorpe letters in his biography, Prick Up Your Ears, and found the concept of spoof letters hilarious, especially when I discovered that Edna had a counterpart: the endlessly congratulatory Donald H. Hartley, also constructed by Orton. The pair would even argue about Orton’s plays in newspaper review columns! I was already an Edna enthusiast, therefore, when my English teacher recommended this competition to the class.

Given my own participation in Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for Future, I wanted to provide a comedic account of the petty individualism which prevents many people from engaging with the important issues these movements represent. Through the prominent roles cooking, frying and charring play in this short narrative, I provide an allegory of climate change, a theme which I tried to make implicit further in the name I originally gave to my Edna Welthorpe, 'Constance Mundham,' which I derived from the Latin expression 'contra mundum.' I thought this phrase appropriate because it crops up regularly in Joe Orton’s defiant diary entries, and also because its literal meaning – ‘against the world’ – seemed to fit my character in every sense: against everyone around her and, in her inability to comprehend bigger issues than her cookery class, against the planet.

I really enjoyed using my knowledge of Orton’s style, which I had gathered from English lessons, and applying it to my own Edna Welthorpe letter. Writing the piece towards the end of studying Loot, the Edna Welthorpe competition was the ideal way to round everything up, channelling my various impressions of his work into this entry.

"Nature, the Environment & Sustainability" Short Story Competition 2023

 

Photo: cocoparisienne @ Pixabay

Are you moved by our connections with the natural world? Are you interested in nature writing, climate fiction, the ecological crisis, the Anthropocene, nature and well-being? 

The University of Leicester’s Centre for New Writing and Centre for Environmental Health and Sustainability are jointly sponsoring a short fiction / creative non-fiction competition for East Midlands resident writers on the theme of "Nature, Environment, Sustainability." 

We are looking for compelling writing that fires the imagination, and allows room for hope. But this is an open brief and we’re interested in anything relevant you might produce. It can be fiction in any genre, or creative non-fiction in the form of personal essay, memoir, feature journalism, travel or a hybrid of forms.

We love writers like Richard Powers, Arundhati Roy, Annie Dillard, Amitav Ghosh, Octavia Butler, Elizabeth Kolbert, Kim Stanley Robinson, Mark Cocker, Tim Winton and Barbara Kingsolver; TV shows like Wild Isles and Nature Watch, Big Garden Birdwatch and the Big Butterfly Count. 

At whatever point you are in thinking and writing about nature, the environment, and sustainability, tell us about it in fiction or creative non-fiction of 1500-2500 words.

The competition is free to enter. There are prizes of £600 for the winner and £100 for four other finalists, drawn from a shortlist of ten. The ten shortlistees will have the opportunity to participate in an all-expenses-paid nature writing workshop with the competition judge in February 2024. The five finalists’ works will be published on The Centre for New Writing’s Creative Writing at Leicester blogsite. The winning piece will also be print-published in The Leicester Literary Review. The winning and finalist authors will be invited to read from their work at a special event as part of the Literary Leicester 2024 festival in March alongside the competition judge.

The Centre for New Writing is an interdisciplinary research centre exploring and developing new directions in contemporary writing. You can see more information about our work here. 

The Centre for Environmental Health and Sustainability  conducts research on the impact of the environment on human health. It was established in 2018 with the vision to improve human health and the health of the environment through cutting edge multidisciplinary research, in a changing world. You can read more about it here. 

Literary Leicester is Leicester’s free annual litfest, since 2008. Read more here. 

Meet the Judge

We’re delighted that our competition judge is multi-award-winning author, naturalist and The Guardian’s "Country Diary" writer Mark Cocker. Mark has published a dozen books on a wide range of subjects and contributed to two dozen more. To read more about Mark, see here. 

To Submit Your Entry

Email literarycomp@leicester.ac.uk and include your full name, contact email and phone number IN THE BODY OF THE EMAIL. 

The document itself should be anonymised. It should ONLY contain the title and text, and NOT show the author’s name anywhere. See below for details about how to format your document.

FINAL SUBMISSION DATE IS 11.59pm (23.59) on 15th November 2023.

PLEASE READ THE FOLLOWING RULES CAREFULLY BEFORE SUBMITTING YOUR ENTRY. 

• Entrants must be resident in the East Midlands region, as determined by the Office for National Statistics at the time of the final submission date. See here for details.  Shortlistees’ residency will be confirmed prior to formal announcement. 

• Stories must be between 1500 and 2500 words. Any submissions over or under the word length will be disregarded. They should be submitted as a Word doc or PDF, double-spaced, 12 font in Times New Roman or Arial (unless you have a strong stylistic reason to play with the visual form of the piece on the page).  

• The final submission date is 23.59 on 15th November 2023. Late entries will not be considered in any circumstances.

• Short fiction may be in any genre. Creative non-fiction can be memoir, biography, personal essays, feature journalism, travel writing. They should be written for a lay audience, rather than specialist. 

• All work must be in English. 

• Shortlistees’ and finalists’ names will be published on the Centre for New Writing blogsite and other social media.

• All entries must meaningfully relate to the competition theme of "nature, environment, sustainability." The judge’s decision on relevance is final and cannot be questioned. 

• All entries must be submitted by email to literarycomp@leicester.ac.uk  and include your full name, contact email and phone number IN THE BODY OF THE EMAIL. The document itself should be anonymous: it only contain the title and text, and NOT show the author’s name anywhere. No other method of submission will be accepted.

• Entries should not have been previously published (including self-published, published on a website or broadcast in any way).

• Entries must be entirely original work, written solely by the submitter.

• No competitor may win more than one prize.

• Work must not be produced or edited by Chat GPT or any other AI creation tool.

• Copyright remains with the author but prize winners must give permission to have the work on the Creative Writing at Leicester website for a period of up to twelve months. The winner’s work will also be published in The Leicester Literary Review, subject to the magazine’s copyright provisions.

• Current members of the Centre for New Writing or the Centre for Environmental Health and Sustainability are not allowed to enter the competition.

• Decisions of the judge(s) are final and no correspondence will be entered into regarding the decision.

• Entries that do not comply with the rules will be disqualified.

The Sound of Music: Ekphrastic Review Contest

By Lorette C. Luzajic, editor, The Ekphrastic Review

The Ekphrastic Review is pleased to announce a new flash fiction and poetry contest called The Sound of Music. Explore our curated collection of music-themed artworks, and use them to inspire your stories and poems. 

The judge is Jonathan Taylor, from the University of Leicester. 

The deadline is March 25, 2023.

Selected works will be published in The Ekphrastic Review. First place wins $100 CAD.

Entry is $10 CAD for five poems and/or stories. You can read the rules in full for the competition here. 

You can read more about The Ekphrastic Review on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Joe Orton Creative Writing Competition 2022: The Results

The School of Arts at the University of Leicester runs an annual Joe Orton Creative Writing Competition that invites A-Level students to write an Edna Welthorpe letter. "Edna Welthorpe" was the persona that Orton invented to embody the values he abjured - middle-class, middlebrow, conservative. Through Edna's letters of complaint (or praise), Orton mocks social and sexual convention. 

The Joe Orton Creative Writing Competition is funded by a kind donation from Dame Vivienne Westwood. It runs annually. 

You can read the winning, runner-up and highly commended letters, by Alex Lee, Danny Stringer and Miriam Waters respectively, here. 

Below, Alex and Danny talk about their writing processes, their experiences of writing Edna Welthorpe (Mrs) letters, and their success in the Joe Orton Creative Writing Competition 2021. Congratulations to all the winners!

Winner: Alex Lee, Hill Road Sixth Form College, Cambridge

I first heard about the Enda Welthorpe competition when my Sixth Form English department emailed us all about it. I looked it up and really liked the style of Joe Orton’s letters as the high-strung Mrs Welthorpe. I also write comedy sketches in my spare time, so writing my own letter sounded like a lot of fun. I started by thinking of something she could misinterpret and decided upon Halloween Trick or Treating. Being a fairly recent tradition, I thought it would be exactly the kind of thing Mrs Welthorpe would have missed and would disapprove of should she discover it. Also, people dressed as demons demanding sweets would be quite frightening if you had no idea what was going on, setting her at odds with the “youths” involved and adding a subtext of generational conflict. Having the weirdness of Trick or Treating examined from an outsider’s perspective and a general comic misunderstanding also adds a humorous tone to the letter (I hope).

Reading Joe Orton’s letters, the character of Mrs Welthorpe jumped off the page, so I found capturing her voice quite easy, and the letter almost wrote itself. I really loved coming up with phrases that hyperbolised the events as much as possible to embody Mrs Welthorpe’s formal disdain of “today’s youth.” The hardest part was condensing what I wrote into 200 words, and I really appreciated Joe Orton’s craftmanship in creating such a vivid characterisation in such brief pieces of writing.

I’m absolutely over the moon that my letter was chosen as the winner. I’m really glad the judges thought I’d captured the spirit of Joe Orton as I intended. And other people enjoying what I’ve written is just the best feeling I could ask for. I’m so grateful to the organisers at Leicester University for running such a brilliant competition. It was just so much fun to take part in, and I hope it continues Joe Orton’s legacy for years to come.

Runner-Up: Danny Stringer, Reigate College Surrey

My first experience with Joe Orton was reading his diaries, which later led me to his plays. I was immediately impressed by his eye for wittily pointing out some of the blatant hypocrisies of traditional English society. He has been compared to Oscar Wilde for that reason, who like Orton has sometimes had the greatness of his works dismissed by some ugly trivialities.

Entering the competition, I remembered the rebellious gall of the Edna Welthorpe letters and was excited to adopt her voice as my own. Edna, Orton’s mouthpiece, hilariously exposed the non-sensical element of prejudice. When I wrote my letter directed to Hellmann's mayonnaise, Edna is infuriated by a new recipe that she alleges is the product of a declining society, one straying from the traditional norms that she is accustomed to. I chose mayonnaise because it is ordinary, traditional, and inoffensive. This new recipe is unpalatably spicy to Edna, and she believes it to be an affront to her extremely British taste-buds due to her obvious xenophobia. Orton used Edna to satirize a world unwilling to change its rigid rule book. As a queer person, I have been made uncomfortable in situations with people who suppose that society is headed downhill due to people like me. But what I admire about Orton, also queer, was that he realized his status as an outsider and used it to his advantage, making himself a spectator which gave him a gift for insight. When I wrote about “our society’s repulsive dance with decadence” I was making fun of some bigots who understand that hate-speech is no longer welcomed in most mainstream circles and find other ways of indirectly expressing it. “Decadence” is a nod to queer people, though Edna wouldn’t overtly say it.

I enjoyed being able to steal Orton’s iconic character for a moment and tried hard to make her seem as insane as possible. I found more and more as I wrote it that a lot of hysteria comes from people being afraid of change. Though going back a few steps is inevitable, arguably progression is even more so.