We would like to take this opportunity to thank Lloyd Jones for judging the Short Story Competition for the past five years. Diolch yn fawr Lloyd.

Today we are immensely proud and pleased to announce that in 2014, author Mike Jenkins will judge the entries in the West Coast Eisteddfod Online Short Story competition.

Poet, story writer and novelist. Mike is a former teacher at Comprehensive school level for nearly 30 years and is now a fulltime writer and is available for readings and workshops at any time. Mike has lived in Merthyr for over 30 years and was winner of an Eric Gregory Award in 1979 and the Welsh Arts Council Young Writers Prize in 1984. Mike also won the John Tripp Award for Spoken Poetry and the 1998 Wales Book of the Year (English section) for Wanting To Belong (Seren, 2000), a book of interlinked stories for teenagers. He was a runner-up in Academi's 2009 Rhys Davies Short Story Competition.

He is a former editor of Poetry Wales and has coedited Red Poets magazine for many years. His latest novella The Fugitive Three centres on three young people in a South Wales Valleys estate whose stories intertwine and who, despite the odds, refuse to live lives of quiet desperation. It is fast-paced and written in a tight dialect in the third person narrative. Mike is a Fellow of Academi. Read his poem for Glyn Jones here .

Mike and painter Michael Gustavius Payne have recently been successful in an application to the Arts Council of Wales to tour a body of work across Wales in 2011 and 2012. The exhibition, currently being developed, will be titled 'Dim Gobaith Caneri', meaning no hope like a canary exploring ideas inspired by traditional Welsh idioms and phrases. Mike's latest book Barkin is a collection of poems and short stories published by Carreg Gwalch.'( Read our review of Barkin )

JOIN THE WCE ONLINE SHORT STORY

COMPETITION GROUP HERE

( You will need to be logged in to AmeriCymru to join the group. If you wish to enter externally please read the submission guidelines on the above linked page )