emagazine Close Reading Competition 2026 – The Results!

Barbara Bleiman, co-editor of emagazine reflects on this year's competition

This year’s entries to the Close Reading Competition were a delight to read! The opening to Twist, which like the title, twists in different directions, making the reader question their certainties about the characters as well as narrative itself, provoked really strong, thoughtful, engaged responses.

We were especially delighted that, for the first year in a long while, there was so much authentic, clear, well-judged writing. It seems that the important messages about avoiding formulaic writing, dictionary definitions of words, labelling of literary techniques for its own sake, and overly complex vocabulary and sentences, were all being heeded. Most of the writing we saw was clear, made good sense and had a really good stab at expressing what was most special and significant about the extract as the opening of a novel.

This made the judging really difficult. There were many students whose writing narrowly missed being shortlisted. You should all feel proud of yourselves! Inevitably the choice of winner and runners’ up has an element of subjectivity about it, but the Judge, Tom Gatti and emagazine editors were united in agreeing that the winner stood out as being a particularly stylish and committed piece of writing. Well done to her and to everyone else who made the shortlist!

Judge Tom Gatti, Culture Editor of The Observer, comments on the winning entries

WINNER: Levina de Bie-Vyner, Hurtwood House

The winning entry has a direct and lively prose style that engages from the first sentence. It brings original insight: many entrants rightly picked up on the ambiguity and uncertainty of the passage but only our winner decided to link these qualities to the context of a post-truth age, a line that was convincingly argued throughout. In a smart conclusion, they also capture a central paradox of the text: that this story seems to be powered not by suspension of disbelief but deep distrust of narrative itself. 

JOINT RUNNER-UP: Koyenum Adoh, Kendrick School

This entry earns its runner-up place with an impressive clarity of thought and expression. It tracks the various tensions and contradictions in the extract, and rather than attempting to explain or unpick them, shows how they give the opening a compelling air of mystery. A thorough and thoughtful essay.

JOINT RUNNER-UP: Nelly Palmer, Bedford Modern School

Literary techniques are confidently analysed in this forensic runner-up entry. Constructed around the core theme of storytelling, it builds towards a series of strong points and a resounding conclusion that reminds us of the key relationship between reader and writer. 

HIGHLY COMMENDED: Nicolas Woo, Harrow International School Hong Kong

This entry is highly commended for its original line of argument. Its use of contextual information on Georges Lecointe perhaps goes slightly beyond the close reading brief but in a way that sheds valuable light on the text – and it is written with real flair.

SHORTLIST

• Elodie Freeland, Marlborough College
• Rina Kobayashi, Alexandra Park School
• Allegra Mee, Latymer Upper School
• Awen Moseley, British School of Brussels
• Mia Matthews, Latymer Upper School
• Sophia Newton, Notre Dame School Cobham
• Adeline Udeh, Latymer Upper School

There are some novel openings that immediately demand attention, and others that work more quietly. Colum McCann’s Twist feels like the second kind. Before the plot fully develops or the characters become clear, McCann is already asking a bigger question: can storytelling still work in a world shaped by misinformation, judgment, and half-truths?  

‘We are all shards in the smash-up.’ That line immediately stood out to me because it feels both personal and universal. ‘Shards’ suggests something sharp and broken, while ‘smash-up’ sounds strangely casual, almost like everyday slang. I think that contrast is intentional. McCann presents a world where disaster has become so common that we describe it in ordinary language. The use of ‘we’ is important too because it pulls the reader into the damage rather than letting us observe it from a distance. Conway’s tragedy does not belong only to him; it reflects something wider about modern life.  

What I found especially interesting, as someone who enjoys literature and history, is the way McCann blends the two together. The extract is filled with anxiety about truth and information. When he describes ‘websites and platforms and rumour mills’ creating ‘paywalls out of the piles of shredded facts,’ he is doing more than adding modern detail. He is suggesting that truth itself has become unstable. Facts are not only distorted but packaged, sold, and broken apart before people can even understand them properly. As a student of history, that idea feels unsettling because history depends on the belief that facts, even debated ones, still exist in some form.  

The narrator’s voice adds to this uncertainty. He constantly questions himself with phrases like ‘I am quite sure,’ ‘maybe,’ ‘perhaps,’ and ‘I am not sure.’ Instead of sounding weak, this makes the narration feel more honest to me. Older novels often give narrators complete authority, but McCann reflects how uncertain knowledge can feel today. The repeated use of ‘how’ – ‘how he was wrecked,’ ‘how he fooled himself,’ ‘how we fooled ourselves’ – creates a rhythm that feels almost mournful, like someone trying to make sense of guilt that will not disappear.  

Conway himself is also presented in a memorable way: ‘a lantern heart full of petrol.’ I found that metaphor resoundingly effective. A lantern suggests warmth and light, while petrol suggests danger and explosion. Conway seems capable of both. His downfall feels inevitable, but it also feels very modern, shaped by loneliness, self-deception, and the overwhelming noise of contemporary life.  

What McCann offers in this opening is less a simple beginning and more a reflection on memory, truth and the limits of storytelling itself. The narrator admits he no longer fully trusts stories, yet that confession becomes the story, which is what makes the opening so compelling.      

In the opening of Twist, McCann uses subjective first-person narration and abstract imagery to create an ambiguous narrative. Although the narrator ostensibly sets out to recount the story of John Conway, the captain of a cable-repair vessel, the extract increasingly suggests that Conway’s story is emotionally intertwined with the narrator’s own. As a result, the passage blurs the boundaries between journalism and fiction, fact and storytelling, leaving the reader with more questions than answers. 

From its opening lines, McCann uses imagery of fragmentation and collision to foreshadow the unstable relationship between Conway and the narrator. The collective declarations ‘we all are shards in the smash-up’ and ‘our lives…bounce around on the sea floor’ links the human experience to the subject matter of fibre-optic cables at the bottom of the sea. The contrast between ‘tenderly’ and the connotations of ‘collide and splinter’ convey a tension between intimacy and destruction that seems to underscore the narrator’s relationship with Conway. Consequently, this epigraph seems to suggest the fibre-optic cables as a metaphor for human connection, particularly the connection between Conway and the narrator. 

The narrator’s attitude towards Conway further complicates the narrative. Conway is referred to only by surname, a formality bordering on reverence. Although the narrator insists from the outset that he is not writing ‘an elegy’ or ‘praise song’, the rest of the extract contradicts this claim, elevating Conway into a figure of fascination and mystery. The narrator confidently assumes that the world, and thus the reader, will share his admiration – ‘I am quite sure that I will hear the name of Conway again and again in the years to come’ – despite never explaining what Conway has done to deserve it. Their relationship is further complicated by the narrator’s claim he is the ‘only one’ who can tell Conway’s story, which he must tell ‘alongside [his] own’, implying an intimacy that goes beyond professional journalistic interest. 

The narrator admits his own unreliability, though he evades responsibility by presenting dishonesty as a universal truth rather than an individual failing- ‘we have all had our difficulties with the shape of the truth’ – and using dismissive language to void all criticism – ‘if I take liberties with the gaps, then so be it’. This unreliability undermines the narrator’s stated journalistic intentions, which coupled with the continued use of abstract imagery and subtle allusions to unspoken events opposes the typical concern with facts and clarity expected from journalism. The revelation that the narrator’s impetus to research Conway was his writer’s block further implies this narrative functions as a substitute for the fiction he could not write. The last story the narrator tried to write, ‘a simple love story’ that turned out to be a ‘soliloquy of solitude’, raises the question of whether the aforementioned ambiguous ‘collision’ may become that love story.  The extract ends as vaguely as it begins – ‘fall and echo, echo and fall’ – compelling the reader to read on to find out what really happened to the narrator and Conway on the Georges-Lecointe.

In this candid, confessional opening, McCann explores his speaker’s conflicted relationship with the practice of storytelling. As a book whose narrator is a ‘novelist’ on a mission to repair the cables that facilitate global information transmission, Twist is deeply attentive to the ways that communication shapes our world. However, this opening suggests that McCann is equally conscious of the limitations of stories: their capacity to distort as well as compel.  

The choice of first-person narrator immediately highlights the contradictions of seeing through a storyteller’s eyes. The influence of Modernism (Josef Conrad in particular) is evident throughout. Metafictional allusion and cynical negation are present from his opening assurance that ‘I am not here to make an elegy.’ As his testimony continues, themes of moral chaos, isolation, and abused power are frequently approached from an uncannily poetic perspective. He mocks ‘paywalls’ made ‘out of the piles of shredded facts’ through bitter plosives and sibilance – their inevitable supremacy only intensifying his literary ideals. ‘All my characters slipped into a chasm,’ he later claims, expressing disillusionment with writing through an ironically novelistic diction of hyperbole and metaphor. For a storyteller, beauty and torment are inseparable, and interdependent. 

The speaker’s characterisation of Conway is equally revealing. The Promethean metaphor of Conway’s ‘lantern heart’ that ‘flared’ presents human integrity as a necessary sacrifice to the lure of technological power. The speaker describes how ‘strange forces worked upon him [Conway],’ using the passive voice to (perhaps subconsciously) deflect blame from a man that he appears to idolise, as well as pity. His persistent curiosity demonstrates both honesty and potential unreliability. Storytellers instinctively rationalise motive and admire intensity of character, making them both protectors and corruptors of truth. 

This paradox is a concern of the novel’s writer, as well as its speaker. McCann’s use of prolepsis subverts conventional forms of narrative tension: almost immediately, we know that Conway was ‘wrecked.’ Suspense is provided in other ways: McCann often leaving us uncertain about the boundary between metaphor and literal description. His opening prophecy that ‘eventually, and inevitably, we collide and splinter’ lacks context – leaving readers uncertain whether it is intended as a vague expression of a nihilistic tone, a literal description of a deep-sea disaster, or a political metaphor. Such cryptic images are used throughout the novel’s opening: we are warned of the fickle ‘shape of the truth,’ how the ‘centre of the world was slipping,’ how Conway was ‘spiralling inwards and downwards’. The use of spatial language ironically highlights our lack of grounding in reality. McCann leaves us no choice but to trust the speaker’s judgement. This enhances our empathy, but leaves us vulnerable to bias. 

By opening the novel with the narrator’s reflections on their motivations and convictions, McCann reveals the plot’s conclusion, but blurs its significance. As we commit ourselves to accompanying our speaker on a voyage that we know ends in disaster, we are forced to interrogate our own craving for stories, and our dependence on those who tell them.

In this densely layered opening to Colum McCann’s Twist, a single overlooked name — Georges Lecointe — interweaves historical implications with psychological foreshadowing to establish the novel’s central arc: the slow, invisible unravelling of selfhood. McCann deploys historical reference and the narrator’s torment of creative and moral stasis to suggest that repair and ruin are indistinguishable, and that the journey toward reconnection is also the journey into entrapment. 

McCann begins by offering a meditation on shards and collisions: ‘We are all shards in the smash-up.’ The declarative present tense — 'bounce', 'collide' and 'splinter' — collapses past and future into a fragmented structure, revealing the narrator’s disintegration. But the most interesting choice is the naming of the cable-repair vessel after Georges Lecointe, second-in-command on the Belgica expedition. This expedition was the first to overwinter in Antarctica, thus, foreshadows the narrator’s psychological disintegration: trapped in ice for nearly a year, men lost their grasp on reality, suffering scurvy and hallucinations. Lecointe himself later described a madness so absolute that his identity began to erode. By naming the ship after Lecointe, McCann foreshadows psychological unravelling through stillness. The ship ostensibly exists to repair fibre-optic cables, to reconnect the fractured; yet its name conjures the opposite: entrapment and isolation. The Georges Lecointe is therefore not a vessel of rescue but a relic of Antarctic madness, already frozen in place before the narrator’s voyage begins. 

This historical reference deepens the extract’s ambiguity. McCann deviates from signposting references, leaving a gap for the audience to fill. This mirrors the narrator’s unreliable nature: his admission that he may ‘take liberties with the gaps’ — a confession of fallibility that suggests the novel is a deliberate patchwork of invention. The narrator confesses his motives: ‘I tell this story to get rid of it, or to open up the silence, or to salve my own conscience, or perhaps I tell it because I am scared of what I too have become’. McCann constructs this sentence as a grammar of disintegration, where the polysyndeton of ‘or’ does not offer alternatives but an accumulation of failure. The narrator cannot locate a single motive; instead, he offers a list of empty reasons. The first three clauses are active: ‘get rid of’, ‘open up’, ‘salve’. These verbs suggest agency, a narrator who believes storytelling can expel memory and soothe guilt. But the fourth clause introduces a pivot: ‘or perhaps I tell it because I am scared’. ‘Perhaps’ suggests uncertainty, destabilising the clauses that came before, casting the first three motives as possible self-deceptions. Additionally, the word ‘too’ relates the narrator to Conway, who ‘spiralled inwards and downwards’, fearing he is already inside his own disintegration. 

Therefore, McCann fuses historical references and the narrator’s disintegration to produce an opening that establishes the tragedy that will soon unravel. The Georges Lecointe is not merely a ship but a foreshadowing; the narrator’s polysyndeton does not offer genuine alternatives but a slow list of collapse. By denying the audience a stable protagonist, a clear motive, or a trustworthy name, McCann reveals that the real ‘smash-up’ is not Conway’s disappearance but the shattering of narrative authority itself. The opening promises resolution to be in debris, inviting the reader to piece together shards from different puzzles.