Winner's stories are published

Bert Velthuis, who won the Global Short Story Competition’s annual prize for 2011 with his story Napolo, has had a collection of short stories published, called In a Four Wheeled Bed of Flowers.

The twenty-six stories read like tales told to friends at sundown on the terrace, a glass of wine in hand, small bowls of olives and roasted almonds on the table.

They embrace almost eighty years, the earliest stories about Bert’s youth in a provincial town in the East of Holland in the thirties and forties of last century. Following these are the years at college in the fifties, studying tropical agriculture and, at the end of that decade, departure to Africa where the flags of colonial powers Great Britain, France, Belgium, Spain and Portugal still flew in most countries south of the Sahara.

The small Central African British Protectorate of Nyasaland – to become the Republic of Malawi in 1964 - is the setting for anecdotes of thirty-eight years of a tea planter’s life.

The final stories of the book are of Ibiza where Bert and Anneke live their vintage years in an old finca, surrounded by vines, and orange, lemon, fig and almond trees.
To order the book, prepared in conjunction with Anneke, you can send an e-mail to bertvelthuis@telefonica.net or write to Bert Velthuis, Buzon 48, Telepost, Paseo Vara de Rey 4, 07800 Ibiza, Spain, for information on payment.

Price per copy: £ 10.00.

Postage: £ 5.50 ( outside Europe: £ 7.60 ).