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

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.

Call for Entries: G. S. Fraser Poetry Prize 2020

This is a call for submissions for this year's G. S. Fraser Poetry Prize.

Guidelines
Any student currently enrolled at the University of Leicester may enter. Entrants may submit up to three poems. Poems may be on any subject but must not exceed 40 lines. Poems must not have been published or have won another prize.

How to enter
To enter please email your poem(s), one poem per page, in a Word or pdf attachment from your University email address to ngre1 [at] le.ac.uk, with ‘G. S. Fraser Prize’ in the subject line and your name in the message. 

Timescale
The deadline for submissions is: 5 p.m. on Friday 22 May 2020. The result will be announced on Friday 19 June. A prize of £50 will be awarded to the author of the winning poem.