The 2007 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest winners have been announced. The award "honors the memory (if not the reputation) of Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873). The goal of the contest is childishly simple: entrants are challenged to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels."
This year's overall winner was Jim Gleeson of Madison, WI. His entry: "Gerald began--but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten percent of his hearing permanently, as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much because for them 'permanently' meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash--to pee."
There are, naturally, additional winners in various categories: adventure, children's literature, detective, fantasy fiction, historical fiction, purple prose, romance, science fiction, vile puns (awful, but hilarious) and western.
I must mention the winner of the children's lit category: "Danny, the little Grizzly cub, frolicked in the tall grass on this sunny Spring morning, his mother keeping a watchful eye as she chewed on a piece of a hiker they had encountered the day before."
Back on 1 July, San Jose State Univ. professor Scott Rice spoke to NPR's Liane Hansen about the contest, which is in its twenty-fifth year.
[h/t The Little Professor]
