Right on the Margin

You’re sixteen and you write poems. Maybe they exist only on your phone or in a battered notebook. What do you do with them?

You could show them to friends, get up on stage at a poetry slam or send them to a magazine. You might even start dreaming about a book of your own. But who decides when someone who writes becomes a writer?

Budapest has a story that fits that question rather well. It begins – quite literally – at the margin. In Hungarian, margó means a margin or the edge of a page. When the Margó Literary Festival was founded in 2011, the name worked on several levels: the new festival initially ran alongside Budapest’s International Book Festival, on its margins, as it were. And a page margin is not empty either. It is where notes, thoughts and unexpected sentences can appear while we read.

What began on the margins grew into a literary festival in its own right. In 2015 the Margó Prize was added, honouring the best first prose book each year. Authors who have previously published poetry or drama are not automatically excluded; what matters is that this is their first prose volume. Benedek Totth was the first winner in 2015. Ten years later, Marcsi Tóth won with Erdő van idebenn.

Her path did not begin in 2025. Tóth has published short stories in Hungarian literary magazines since 2011, and her work regularly appeared in the Körkép anthology between 2012 and 2016. In 2023, an early manuscript of Erdő van idebenn came second in the Petri György Prize. Her first prose volume was finally published by Magvető in May 2025; five months later it won the Margó Prize. Fourteen years separate those first published stories from the book. That does not mean she opened the same file every morning for fourteen years. It tells us something more interesting: the road from first texts to a first book can be a long one.

In Erdő van idebenn, a mother returns with her teenage daughter to a forest-surrounded village in north-eastern Hungary, hoping to start again by working at a friend’s guesthouse. The book explores families, women and life away from the big cities. That makes it an unexpectedly good match for a prize called Margó: here too, attention turns towards something easily dismissed as peripheral.

On Monday evening, Marcsi Tóth will present her book at Müpa Budapest. The name comes from Művészetek Palotája, the Palace of Arts, a major cultural centre on the Danube with concert halls, theatre spaces and other stages. Her event is part of Liszt Fest, the international cultural festival launched in 2021 for the 210th anniversary of Franz Liszt’s birth. From 8 to 22 October 2026, it brings classical and contemporary music together with jazz, pop, dance, literature and visual art. In other words, it is emphatically not two solid weeks of Liszt piano music.

So how does a writer with her first prose book end up on the stage of this festival? The answer is part of the Margó Prize itself. Today the package includes one million forints – about €2,700 – media support for the winning book, a sample translation and publication opportunities. The winner also receives an evening of their own at the following year’s Liszt Fest. That is why Marcsi Tóth and actor Csilla Radnay will read prose on Monday, while András Szekeres sings and plays guitar and László Valuska hosts the conversation. Tóth is no longer quite so far out on the margin.

The idea of giving special attention to a first book is not unique to Hungary. France has its Prix du premier roman for debut novels, while the European Union Prize for Literature helps emerging writers cross national and linguistic borders, including through translation support and appearances at international book fairs. That is an important difference from a trophy sitting on a shelf: a literary prize can try to open a door. A translation can carry a Hungarian book into another country; a festival stage can introduce an author to people who had never heard her name before.

Which brings us back to our sixteen-year-old with poems on a phone. Do those poems have to become a book? Of course not. A poetry slam might be exactly the right form, as might a school newspaper, literary magazine, writing competition or small stage. Writing can also remain something you do for yourself. But if you want other people to read your words, at some point you have to move them a little way from the margin towards the centre.

Marcsi Tóth took quite a while to do that. On Monday evening she will be sitting in Müpa’s Glass Hall, in the middle of an international cultural festival. An actor will read her work with her, a musician will pick up a guitar, and people will have come to talk about her first book. Somewhere in the audience, someone may scribble a sentence in the margin of a book. Perhaps the next story begins there.