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Prospero, Genius #172, Oct 2, 2017 is by the same setter.

Hmm. This is what I have, tho' I did toy with "offy" as convenient amenity...

I have a completely filled grid which I think is all correct but cannot for the life of me parse 11 and 23. Help please.

11: the superfluous letter is the A of avoid. That will give you the 2nd and third letters of the answer. Definition is "set aside".
23: superfluous letter is the first U. That leads to an anagram, with the definition "barely evident", but in a misleading way.

Thanks peterm for your help. I can now see 11 which should have been obvious to me. However, the only way that 23 works for me is that I take 'i' for India.Surely India is 'Ind'. I'm obviously missing something!

Uncle-w, I for India is used quite often. It's from the NATO alphabet - A for Alpha, B - Bravo etc.

I as usual got to the crossword rather late but did also find it easier than of late. I do have a problem with the parsing of 5A though. I assume that the answer is a term that is used more commonly in the USA but which is the superfluous letter in the wordplay?

presume you are talking about 5 down ... in which case, you need to take a letter out of "sunk" to give the one letter you need on top of a man's (and woman's) name and a (questionable) word for questions. I'm wondering if this insistence on reducing words to single letters is thematic, since that is the basisof the extra-letter formula ...

Thank you very much Prospero. The abbreviation that was needed didn't cross my mind.

It's a pity that the superfluous letters could not have been incorporated into the grid in some way so as to penalise solvers like me who inserted the right answers (presumably) without really understanding why. It might be a difficult undertaking but I have a vague memory of it being done in the past. The great Araucaria would have relished the challenge, I'm sure.

Yes - there's not a lot of point in creating puzzles that can't be checked. Especially if they're prize puzzles. The Listener used to do it by asking for the solutions that weren't included in the grid to be added in a separate form and one would think that - even with the cumbersome method of submitting Geniuses, which the Guardian should have done something about by now - they could find a way of doing this.