The winner of this year’s competition for stories featuring food and drink and connected with Kipling, is Stef Downham’s ‘A Cup of Chai.’ The runner-up is Nick Meo’s story ‘Dinner with the Enemy’. (The prize for Young Writers is not being awarded this year.) Congratulations to both winners.
Both the winning stories will appear in January 2025, in Kipling Journal 400 (the January number) and on this website.
Janet Montefiore
Competition Organiser
The filmed tour shown at the Society meeting on 18 September 2024.
Our August 2024 Newsletter provides details of future events including our next meeting on Wednesday 18 September. This will be on-line only. A film will be shown of a tour of a tour of the wider Bateman’s estate and Burwash village, interspersed with readings from Kipling at relevant locations. The film will last about 70 minutes, after which there will be an opportunity for questions or a short discussion
A video of Dr Howard Booth’s talk ‘E.M. Forster on Rudyard Kipling: fifty years of responses’ given at the Society meeting on 3 July 2024.
The Society’s President, David Alan Richards, spoke on this topic at the Society’s meeting on 17April 2024.
Newsletters are sent by e-mail to members four weeks before each Society meeting, with details of that meeting and other events, reports on past events, and articles on subjects large and small. Past newsletters are available below, each with an item of particular interest highlighted.
Any member who is not currently receiving an online copy of the Newsletter and would like their name to be added to the mailing list should email the Membership Secretary, Fiona Renshaw, at ksmemsec@outlook.com
Dr Charlotte Boyce of Portsmouth University spoke on this topic at the Society’s meeting on 7 February 2024.
At our meeting on 22nd November, John Walker offered a talk intended to spark discussion. In the event, the online system faltered and he had to shorten his argument.
He has asked that the original text be offered without footnotes and references, peer review, or guidance, in a form that might have been made available to members of the Society fifty years ago. Please click here to read: Kipling and masculinity
At the Society we have been delighted to be approached recently by a teacher whose Year Five pupils have been excited by the Just-So stories and are now writing their own.
If there are other teachers out there, or other parents, who have similar projects to report, or who plan such, we’d love to hear from you. Please email Mary Hamer on 1maryhamer@gmail.com
In the past we have run a competition for children’s Just-So stories. If a number of schools were interested we might consider running it again. Mary Hamer
Poul Anderson, a leading American science fiction writer, wrote of Kipling:
“He is for everyone who responds to vividness, word magic, sheer storytelling. Most readers go on to discover the subtleties and profundities.” There are at least a dozen tales, from “The Finest Story in the World” (1891) to “Unprofessional” (1930) which reflect his fascination with the mysteries of science.
Anderson’s colleague Gordon R. Dickson calls Kipling “a master of our art.”
This is the title of an article by Fred Lerner, who we have recently added to our Profiles in Kipling Studies. [J.R.]
