St Mungo's Mirrorball Poetry Showcase

George Szirtes was born in Budapest in 1948 and is a multi award winning poet. He will be supported by local poets reading from The Honest Error anthology at this Poetry Showcase.

George Szirtes was born in Budapest in 1948, and came to England with his family after the 1956 Hungarian Uprising. He was educated in England, training as a painter, and has always written in English. In recent years he has worked as a translator of Hungarian literature, producing editions of such writers as Otto Orban, Zsuzsa Rakovszky and Agnes Nemes Nagy. He co-edited Bloodaxe's Hungarian anthology The Colonnade of Teeth. His Bloodaxe poetry books are The Budapest File (2000); An English Apocalypse (2001); Reel (2004), winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize; New & Collected Poems (2008) and The Burning of the Books and other poems (2009), shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2009. Bad Machine (2013) was a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2013. His latest collection, Mapping the Delta, Bloodaxe Books, 2016), is a Poetry Book Society Choice. Bloodaxe has also published John Sears' critical study Reading George Szirtes (2008). Szirtes lives in Norfolk and is a freelance writer, having retired from teaching at the University of East Anglia.

Mirrorball member and Clydebuilt mentee Gillean McDougall devised the 'Honest Error' project while a student on the MLitt Creative Writing programme at The University of Glasgow. More than 30 writers contributed to a workshop and website, culminating in the first of five annual anthologies. For 2017, new writing was inspired by Glasgow architect and icon Charles Rennie Mackintosh. A selection of contributors will read from their work and the Honest Error anthology will be available to buy.