"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

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.

G. S. Fraser Poetry Prize Winners 2020

The G. S. Fraser Prize is an annual poetry competition for students at the University of Leicester. The winner of this year's prize is Jane Simmons, for her poem "Flood." Colin Gardiner is runner-up, and receives an honourable mention for his poem "Midnight Trees." You can read about the winners, and the winning poems below.

Jane Simmons is a former teacher/lecturer who has recently completed an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Lincoln. She is now a PhD student at the University of Leicester, where her research project is The Poetics and Politics of Motherhood, a practice-led exploration of motherhood through an environmental and political lens, engaging with the theme creatively and as it is treated in contemporary women’s poetry. As a reviewer for The Blue Nib literary magazine, Jane has built a significant publication history of writing about contemporary women’s poetry. A small selection of her own poems appeared in the March 2019 edition of the magazine. Her collection From Darkness into Light – poems inspired by the Book of Kells – was published in 2018. Further poems will appear in two anthologies to be published by Pimento Press, also in 2019: The View from the Steep, and Seasonal Poems from Pimento Poets. Jane regularly reads/performs her work in the Lincoln area. 



Flood

When you left, the river was already swollen  – 
with still more rain yet to come.
I can hear it now – percussive, insistent, 
demanding I let it in.

On the radio last night, a spokesman intoned
what to do for the best if it came to the worst – 
and I laughed then, and thought of you,
or you as you used to be. 

Remember when the old women said be careful 
what you wish for, but we didn’t listen? 
Well, the trees bow low now, weighted down
with all our sodden prayer-rags.

Today, I woke to find the road missing,
hawthorns wading down the lane - searching  
for lost hedges. There was strange beauty 
in the reflections of rain clouds.

I am a stranger in this watery land - 
cannot read its language. I am adrift, 
lost – but water will find its way. Like you, 
it has a perfect memory -

no wonder the river is full of itself.
Sofas and armchairs lounge in front gardens -
indoors, the water table rises, and fish
play scales on your piano. 

I have stacked your books in the bath, safely,
raised some of the furniture on bricks
you said would come in useful some day -
though you didn’t take them with you.

And still the sky unburdens its grief. 
If I press my ear to the window, 
I can hear accusations – you know 
who you are, you know what you did. 

Colin Gardiner lives in Coventry. He writes short stories and poems and is published by The Ekphrastic Review and the Creative Writing at Leicester blog. He is currently studying a Master's in Creative Writing at Leicester University.


Midnight Trees

There is a shortcut through the park, where
The trees are hanging in a frail parliament.

They lean in for a late-night session.
Their fragile leaves are trembling

At the prospect of autumn alopecia.
Try to imagine the speed of tree-thoughts

Travelling through accumulated rings.
Seeking to reach a form of expression.

Is their understanding articulated only
By green or gradients of red and brown?

Who can tell in the amnesia of moonlight?
A shopping bag is snagged by brittle hands

And held up, beseechingly, to the stars
That glaze the September sky.

Sci-fi Shorts Competition

By Jonathan Taylor

Over the last few months, the Centre for New Writing, Literary Leicester Festival and the National Space Centre have together been running a Creative Writing competition called "Sci-Fi Shorts." Entrants were invited to write science-fiction short stories on a space theme. There were two categories, one for writers 15 and under, one for writers 16+. 

The winners have now been announced, and the awards ceremony took place at the Space Centre as part of Literary Leicester Festival on Saturday, along with talks by eminent science-fiction authors Philip Reeve and Alastair Reynolds. 

The judging panel included representatives from the National Space Centre and the Centre for New Writing at the University of Leicester. I was one of them. The competition was hugely enjoyable to judge, and there were many strong entries to choose from - despite the difficulty of the challenge. As someone whose first published stories were science fiction, I often think science fiction is one of the hardest of all genres to write in. You have to juggle so many different elements in a successful science fiction story: stylish writing, characterisation, convincing scientific details, so-called "world building," and the demands of narrative - of telling a good story.  I moved away from writing science fiction many years ago - though I've always thought I might eventually return to it, and I still read widely in the form - to write in a more "realist" (or magical-realist) vein. I can't help feeling that realism is easier in some ways: you don't have to manage the science in the same way, and your world is ready-built for you. To manage these things whilst telling a good and emotional story is the great challenge of science fiction; and the winning entries for this competition did so brilliantly, almost effortlessly, in ways I very much admire.

You can read the prize-winning entries via the links below:

Age 16+:
Winner: 'In Gagarin’s Time' by Laura Ward
Runner-up: 'Bunker Mentality' by Paul Starkey 

Age 15 and below:
Winner: 'In Armstrong’s Footsteps' by Ashley Tan Mei-Lynn 
Runner-up: 'Lost In Space' by Giles Carey

Honourable Mentions:
‘What is it, Leavine?’ by Adair Cole 

‘Space Debris’ by Andrew Doubt 

Some of the winners with Philip Reeve at the Space Centre