AUCKLAND WEEKLY NEWS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXIII, Issue 10278, 2 November 1896, Page 5

AUCKLAND WEEKLY NEWS.

CHRISTMAS COMPETITIONS. Thb Christmas Prize Competitions of the Auckland Weekly News have come to be looked upon as the moat interesting literary event of the year. Ever since they were commenced, in the hope of discovering some latent talent which with a little encouragement might be placed on the high road to fame and fortune, interest in them has been growing. Each succeeding year the number of competitors increases, and although they have not yet added a now star to the literary firmament, we are not without hope that there are among thorn some who are destined to win distinction in Letters in the days to come. We have afforded in past years an opportunity for displaying the powers of the imagination in the form of dramatic fiction, and of exhibiting the art of successful narrative in the recital of' weird experiences and personal adventures. This year we have determined to uppoal to the purely humorous sense of contributors. There is, or ought to be, a vast fund of humour in New Zealand. It is the Land of Topsy-turvydoin, and therefore the moat favourable for the growth and development of humour, which, us some one has said vory truly, always involves a shock of some ,kind, either "of exaggeration, a reversal of ideas, a sense of the incongruous, or the impossible. The proceedings in our Parliament, for instance, are sometimes almost as amusing as a comic opera,' and we have known of nothing more genuinely humorous on the stngo or in the pages of Dickens or Artemus Ward than some of the incidents of our Siolitioal life. We have great hopes, thereore, that the competition this year will prove the most interesting and attractive and successful of the series, The proprietors of the Auckland Weekly N lews offer three prizes, as follows, for the best humorous anecdote or story :— First Prize £3 3s Second Prize £2 2s Third Prize £1 Is The story or anecdote must be of New Zealand origin, and must not exceed 400 words in length. It mwb be oloarly written, on one sidtt of the paper only. All competitions should be addressed, 'Competition Editor, Auckland Weekly News, Auckland,' and should reach him not Inter than November 14. Where a nom dt plume is adopted, the real name of the writer, together with his or her address, should be enolosed in a separate envelope.