We are immensely proud and pleased to announce that in 2014, author Mike Jenkins together with the editorial board of eto magazine 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 Writer’s 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 co–edited Red Poets magazine for many years. His latest novella The Fugitive Three centres on three young people in a South Wales Valley’s 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.'

This is an exciting opportunity for aspiring short story writers to achieve recognition and publication and we would like to repeat that there are NO registration fees. The winner and his/her work will also be featured on this site on what we hope will be a heavily trafficked page.

Members

Simply post your story (and any links) as a separate discussion in the forum . If you wish to include a link to your website or blog please do so but remember you must link back to us. Please DO NOT submit attachments...cut and paste your story into a discussion dialog box. Click the + sign to open a new discussion.

Post your story on your website or blog and post a link to the relevant url as a separate discussion in the group forum . Once again you will need to link back to us.

Non Members

Post your submission on your blog and email us with the url ( americymru@gmail.com ). We will include it on the Group page. We would appreciate a link to this page or to the blog home page.

Email your submission to us and we will post it on the group page and credit you as author. ( in this case mutual linking is an option but not required )

The Fine Print

There is no entry or submission fee for this competition. The requirement to backlink if you are posting on your own blog and linking here ( or submitting a link to your blog on this page ) is obligatory and designed to be mutually beneficial.

Any materials submitted in this group will remain the sole property of the author. We guarantee not to display any story or any portion thereof on other pages or sites without the express permission of the author. Likewise materials submitted here or linked here can be removed or unlinked at any time by the author or at his/her request.

Cash prizes will only be awarded in the event that there are a minimum of 12 competition entries.  It should be pointed out that we have not, in six years, failed to achieve this target for submissions.