Fiction
Category: Fiction, Short Stories
Number of pages: 128
ISBN: 9781854112101
Publication date: July 1, 1997
Price: £5.95
Out of stock
Helen’s in mourning because Liam has killed himself – she felt she really knew him. Gary is in trouble with the law after that episode with the car. Catherine and Gavin were due some fun in the graveyard before a hair-raising interruption. Tracey wants to play football. And Matthew, well he’s on another planet. Wanting to Belong is about life, love or the lack of it among the teenagers of Cwmtaff. From eco-terrorism at Rudge’s noxious landfill site to betrayal in the 32B gang, the world is a strange place and it’s up to them to find their way in it.
Mike Jenkins
Mike Jenkins is now a full-time writer and teacher of Creative Writing, after spending over 30 years teaching in Secondary education.
He is former editor of Poetry Wales and is co-editor and founder of Red Poets magazine, which has been going for 15 years. He has won an Eric Gregory Award, Welsh Arts Council Young Writers’ Prize, John Tripp Award for Spoken Poetry and, in 1998, the Wales Book of the Year for Wanting to Belong ( Seren ), a book of interlinked stories which was subsequently made into a drama for BBC Wales and also dramatised for a Channel 4 education programme. His novella for teenagers The Climbing Tree was published by Pont in February 2010.
He has appeared at the Hay Festival and Aldeburgh Festivals, has had a BBC programme dedicated to his work, and has read many of his poems on TV and Radio. He has his own website and ‘blogs’ on a regular basis.
A number of his stories have been adapted for radio and he writes regularly for the Cardiff City FC fanzine Watch the Bluebirds Fly and the political magazine Celyn ( left-leaning) where he reviews music from Wales. He also organizes a monthly poetry event in Merthry which includes a guest reader and an ‘open mic’ element.
At present, he’s working on another novel for teenagers and a series of prose-poems based on Welsh idioms in collaboration with Merthyr artist Michael Gustavius Payne.
He lives in Merthyr with wife Marie , who is a teacher, and his younger daughter. His older daughter is a Plaid Cymru AM and his son a reporter on the Politics Show.
