"World Book Day Competition Winners 2008 Ceredigion Museum put out a call for stories and poems about Magic and Myths from Ceredigion and here are the winners.

The 2008 Ceredigion Museum World Book Day Competition theme was Magic and Myths from Ceredigion. The resulting response from the call for entries led to some very difficult decisions being made about who should win.

Many of the entries, particularly in the adult section were very well thought out and ranged enormously in their approach to the suggested theme.

Adjudicator for the competition was Jeremy Turner, director of Arad Goch, theatre in education company. Together with Elinor Ingham, from Ceredigion Library services, and myself, Jeremy helped to set up the competition a number of years ago.

He said, 'World Book Day is an ideal opportunity for people to engage not only with reading books but also to have a go at writing one. With this competition we can inspire budding writers to put pen to paper and start thinking about creating stories of their own. What I really like about it is that people of all ages and abilities can enter this competition.'

The joint first winners in the under 11 section are Thomas Gillison and Hannah Lee from Ysgol Rhydypennau. The winner in the 12-17 section is Ceri Baker for 'The Serpent's Wall'.

The joint first prize winners in the over 18 section are Katherine York, with her piece titled, 'And so the Red Kite came back to Ceredigion' and June Griffiths for her piece titled , 'A quarryman's tale.'

Each winner received a book token as a prize. It was decided that a special prize be awarded for the poetry entries with the winner being Chris Collier for his poem about 'Taliesin's escape from Cantre Gwaelod'.

We were able to host the reading of the winning entries at Ceredigion Museum on Thursday March 6th at the Ceredigion Museum. Actress Sue Jones Davies together with Jeremy Turner read out the winning stories.

This is the third time the competition has been run and we are keen to collect together the winning entries and have them published in the future. 'We have used a variety of themes for the competition over the year. What is particularly good is that stories have come in from all ages.

I have also been using the same themes for the Big Draw Competition in October which has resulted in our having a collection of wonderful prize winning images to go with the stories. This could result in a very interesting book in the future and I will be looking for a way to publish this collection of local work. Hopefully we will be able to launch it on World Book day in a few years time'.

Read some of the winning entries: