First Prize
Hannah Walton • The Hollow Fetch
Joint Second Prize
Christopher Milner • The Man Who Once Was King
Deirdre Parkes • Curled in Sleep
Third Prize
Hilary Wilce • Sloe Thoughts
Highly Commended
Stefin Kohn Forecast
David Mcvey First Over The Top
Georgia Hilton The Old Tin Cup
Katherine Haynes Was It A Ghost?
Caitlyn Drongiti (YWC) Maybe
The Kipling Society’s yearly Literary Competition, funded by a legacy from the late John McGivering, invites submissions of Kipling-related poetry and fiction, in alternate years. In 2026, the theme for stories was ‘The Supernatural’. The judges, Mary Hamer, Sarah LeFanu and myself, were impressed both by the record number of entries (48, plus one Young Competitor) and by the high quality of the stories, whose variety, energy and ingenuity made them a pleasure – often of a shivery kind – to read.
The First Prize was awarded to Hannah Walton’s remarkably well written ‘The Hollow Fetch’, which like Kipling makes the supernatural appear in the everyday, so that the vividly rendered details of ordinary life communicate a true frisson, while its needy spectre is frighteningly mysterious. Joint Second Prizes were awarded to Christopher Milner’s ‘The Man Who Once Was King’ for its freshness and energy, its critical reworking of the Kipling original (with Dravot’s ghost arousing contemporary echoes), and its understatedly sinister ending, and to Deirdre Parkes’ sensuously imagined ‘Curled in Sleep’, which invokes the burdens of secrecy and shame carried by Irish unmarried mothers, by way of Kipling’s ‘They’ (which supplies its epigraph), transforming the traditional candle set in the window to welcome the Christ child into a corpse-candle in an empty cottage very much less grand than Kipling’s child-haunted ‘House Beautiful’. The Third Prize was awarded to Hilary Wilce’s ‘Sloe Thoughts’, a meditative story about grief past and present, in which the bereaved narrator movingly encounters the unrecognised ghost of a compassionate, stoical Kipling.
In addition, we chose four Highly Commended stories, to be posted on the Kipling Society’s website: Georgia Hilton’s ‘The Old Tin Cup’ in which a comfortable Airbnb is haunted by Ireland’s past; Stefin Kohn’s ‘Forecast’, a poignant re-working of Kipling’s ‘The Gardener’; David McVey’s ‘First Over The Top’, vividly imagining a country estate given over to the Army in World War I and the soldiers’ wraiths returning from the Somme, and Katherine Haynes’ lively ‘Was it a Ghost?’ which drew on ‘At the Pit’s Mouth’ to evoke Kipling’s India.
We were disappointed that the Young Writers’ Competition drew only one entry: Caitlyn Drongiti’s ‘Maybe’. Although the story is not obviously connected with Kipling, the judges ranked it as Highly Commended for its energetic engagement with the topic.
Janet Montefiore, Competition Organiser