Giorgio Pressburger was born in 1937 in Budapest. He left Hungary in 1956 and settled in Italy, where he worked as a film and theatre director. He is now the Director of the Institute of Italian Culture in Hungary. He is the author of The Law of White Spaces which won the Independent Foreign Fiction Award in 1992 and Teeth and Spies, both of which are available from Granta Books. ‘The Temple in Budapest’ (Granta 32) is included in a collection of stories entitled Homage to the Eighth District that was published by Readers International in 1990.