A PENARTH writer has been shortlisted for a national short story award.

Joanne Meek stands a chance of winning more than £3,000 if she is crowned the winner of the Costa Short Story Award.

Joanne, who has been nominated for the award for her 'Jellyfish' short story, faces stiff competition from five other writers from across Britain.

The winner will be decided by a public vote and announced at the Costa Book Awards ceremony on Tuesday, January 27.

Joanne, who lives in Penarth, describes herself as "a lover of words, an enthusiast of the short story form and an addict of reading, writing and coffee".

She said: "After years of scribbling in secret as a ‘guilty pleasure’, I graduated from Cardiff University in 2014 with an MA in Creative Writing. I have since been working on numerous pieces of short fiction and a short story cycle.

"I find inspiration for writing fiction in the places I loves and in the complexities of people, both real and imagined."

Established in 2012, the award – run in association with the Costa Book Awards but judged independently of the main five-category system – is unique in that it was judged anonymously, without the name of the author being known throughout the process.

It is open to both published and unpublished writers, for a single, previously unpublished short story of up to 4,000 words by an author aged 18 years or over and written in English.

The shortlist of six stories was selected by a panel of judges comprising writers Patrick Gale and Victoria Hislop; Richard Beard, Director of the National Academy of Writing; Fanny Blake, novelist, journalist and Books Editor of Woman & Home magazine; and Simon Trewin, agent at William Morris Endeavor – and then made available on the Costa Book Awards website for the public to download and read, and then vote for their favourite.

Voting has now closed and Costa has now revealed the names of the six authors shortlisted for the new Award, five of them published and one of them currently unpublished.

Between them, they come from all countries of the UK including England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, and have been shortlisted for many other short story competitions including the Bristol Short Story Prize and The Pushcart Prize.

The six shortlisted authors are Paula Cunningham, Zoe Gilbert, Jane Healey, Joanne Meek, Mark Newman and Lucy Ribchester.

The author of the story that received the most public votes will be announced as winner and receive £3,500 at next week’s Costa Book Awards ceremony, with second place receiving £1,500 and third place £500.

The inaugural winner of the Costa Short Story Award in 2012 was former prison manager now full-time writer, Avril Joy, from Witton-le-Wear in Bishop Auckland whose winning story, Millie and Bird, was included in an anthology of short stories compiled by Victoria Hislop called The Story: Love Loss and the Lives of Women - 100 Great Short Stories (Head of Zeus).

Writer and poet, Angela Readman, won the 2013 Costa Short Story Award for The Keeper of the Jackalopes. The story will feature in her debut short story collection Don’t Try This at Home, published by & Other Stories and available in May 2015.

The Costa Book Awards recognise the most enjoyable books of the last year by writers based in the UK and Ireland. Formerly known as the Whitbread Book Awards, Costa announced its takeover of the sponsorship of the UK’s prestigious and popular book prize in 2006.