Ellen McAteer is General Manager of Poetry London and the founder of tell it slant poetry bookshop in Glasgow. She has won a Waterstones’ Poetry Competition, and been shortlisted for the Bridport and Baker prizes. Ellen received an Arts Council grant to develop her creative practice under the mentorship of Rachel Long. She was a mentee of Alexander Hutchinson under the St Mungo’s Mirrorball Clydebuilt Apprenticeship Scheme, and a member of Donny O’Rourke’s poetry group. She has been a Director of the Scottish Writers’ Centre and the Poetry Trust, and a visiting lecturer at the Glasgow School of Art.

 

Honesty Mirror won the New Writer magazine prize, judged by Helen Mort. It is a psychogeographical study in how an unspoken inner life can become projected on to landscapes, cityscapes, objects and edgelands filled with ancestors, on a journey to escape the self.

 

“Landscape becomes a character in the taut poems of Honesty Mirror, poems which chart both the inevitable— ‘water pulling sky to sea’—and the surprising—ghosts glimpsed in the mirror, supernatural glimmers on a city street—with precision and grace. We find ourselves in a strange, familiar place where ‘our faces are the only language we have’.”

 

—Helen Mort

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