I am very pleased to announce the results of the creative writing competition that I launched on this site in late July. Entrants were required to interpret five of my digital pictures, providing tweet-length texts to accompany them. Full details can be found here.

It’s a horrible cliche, but judging wasn’t easy. To make the task more manageable, I gave each entry a mark out of 10, in each of four categories:

1. Interpretation. I wanted to see evidence that my pictures had been carefully considered and used as a springboard for fresh ideas.
2. Invention. Ingenuity and creativity were the order of the day!
3. Style. This covered a range of factors, but essentially amounted to the question, “Does this read well?”
4. Cohesion. When I created the source pictures I did not have a sequence in mind. But I wanted to see how the entrants could make links between one image and the next, generate wholeness out of discontinuous elements.

And then, after I’d “marked” them all I read them again and listened to my instincts. This helped discriminate where I’d given two pieces exactly the same overall mark out of 40.

Long story short, here are the winners.

Winner: Adam Wimbush for his entry, “Enter Entropy”. Adam wins a signed copy of my new book, Head Traumas, plus a digital copy of it.

Runners-up: Abbie Foxton, Mandy Gibson, Kevin Reid & Christina Scholz. I had planned to award only two runners-up, but the quality of entries made that impossible! All runners-up will receive digital copies of Head Traumas.

I just want to say THANK YOU to everyone who entered the competition. I was blown away by your creativity and cleverness, and by the diversity of your ideas! Kevin Reid suggested I issue an anthology of the entries, and that’s something I may approach you all about, if you’d be interested.

I leave you with the winning entry, with the pictures its author used as a starting point.

Adam Wimbush: Enter Entropy

1 • As the cells of communication wash up on the shore of syntax they begin to build an alphabet of bubbles…

2 • …popping in the shadow cycle of Fibonacci codes. Corkscrewing out of prehistoric modes. There…

3 • …amongst this ambient dirt, bones polarise, forming deformed skeletons of language that clatter off into spectrums of meat.

4 • Thought fossils are found within the attic of your skull where neural pathways are sculpted and born and…

5 • …when entropy enters through the open window of your soul, it’s unraveled, revealed and read by the Gods.