St Mungo's Mirrorball Showcase 7

The multi-award winning Irish poet Michael Longley makes a rare visit to Glasgow reading along side rising stars Rishi Dastidar and Ciara MacLaverty.

Michael Longley was born in Belfast in 1939 and has published ten collections of poetry including Gorse Fires (1991) which won the Whitbread Poetry Award, and The Weather in Japan (2000) which won the Hawthornden Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Irish Times Poetry Prize. His Collected Poems was published in 2006. In 2001 he received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, and in 2003 the Wilfred Owen Award. He was awarded a CBE in 2010. He was Ireland Professor of Poetry, 2007–2010. He and his wife, the critic Edna Longley, live and work in Belfast.

Rishi Dastidar is a fellow of The Complete Works, a consulting editor at The Rialto magazine, a member of the Malika’s Poetry Kitchen collective, and also serves as a chair of the writer development organization Spread The Word. His debut collection Ticker-tape is published by Nine Arches Press, and a poem from it was included in The Forward Book of Poetry 2018.

Ciara MacLaverty's poems have appeared in The Herald, The Scotsman and Gutter. Her first pamphlet, Seats For Landing came out in 2005 and, from it, the poem, Peeled was chosen for Scottish Poem of the Year.Ciara was a Clydebuilt Mentee in 2016 and went on to win a New Writers’ Award from the Scottish Book Trust in 2017, culminating in the release of The Tracks They Leave Behind from Tapsalteerie Press.