Sponsored by Monmouth College
Eligibility
This contest is open to any student enrolled full-time in high school anywhere in the world during the current school year. An award of $250 will be given to the author of the best entry, which may take the form of a short story, essay, play, poem, or original literary work of any other sort. Entries will be judged on accuracy to ancient sources (as relevant to this project), appropriate use of those sources, originality, quality of material, thematic development, English style, and effectiveness of presentation.
Submission Deadline
March 15, 2024
Application Guidelines and Instructions
You can download the full application guidelines and instructions here.
Theme: Olympians and Olympians: Achieving in Unconventional Ways
2024 is an Olympic year, which brings into many people’s minds not just the athletes from around the modern world who compete against one another at the highest level, but also the original Olympians, the various immortal dwellers on Greece’s Mt. Olympus. One of the things that makes the modern Olympics interesting is the highlighting of athletes and sports that do not normally receive the most coverage on networks like ESPN, and on skills that make people great that do not always bring them great acclaim. This year’s Fox Contest asks you to think of dwellers on Mt. Olympus, including not just those labeled “Olympian gods,” but also those (like Heracles) who are apotheosized, those (like Hebe or Ganymede) who do important jobs for the Olympians, and others who are purported to reside at least part-time on Olympus, such as the Muses. It wants you to think about them using skills that are attested in extant depictions from the ancient world, but that are DIFFERENT from the first ones of which people are likely to think. That is, please steer away from depictions of Zeus as a thrower of projectiles, Athena as a general, Artemis as an archer, etc. Focus, instead, on these Olympians’ secondary or complementary skills that extant myths attest, and create a tale of eventual achievement of these individuals (either in their own characters or in characters recognizably adapted from them) based on such skills. Place your focal figure(s) in the midst of a situation (ancient or modern) in which a secondary or complementary skill of theirs contributes to their overcoming an obstacle and achieving notably in some way. This achievement may be athletic, but it does not need to be. There WILL, though, need to be recognizable reference to the story/stories in which the secondary/complementary skill(s) is/are apparent in ancient sources.
