Results: Guess Who's Not Coming to Dinner?
Just as in real life, your poets’ fears were mostly of food poisoning and boredom -- but, unlike each of us, they were not reluctant to say so. Some were more tactful -- Tony Cloke’s Heaney pleaded a prior engagement judging a Poetry Slam. Others were the stuff of nightmares -- Peter Goulding’s Burns claimed to have been put off all food by an alarming Lowland sighting of a visiting royal Hanoverian item which would have been better confined to the Throne Room.
The determinedly anti-social Mae Scanlan turned down no fewer than three invitations under different aliases. All of them appear below in a precedent which will never be repeated, but which accounts for the larger-than-normal number of deserving winners. (Note: The Editor is not the only Judge of this and other Competitions.)
To read the winning entries, select from the article index on the right or use the first Previous>Next link below.