George Szirtes came to Britain as an eight-year-old refugee after the Hungarian uprising in 1956. Educated in England, he trained as a painter, and has always written in English. This comprehensive retrospective of his work covers poetry from over a dozen collections written over four decades, with a substantial gathering of new poems. It was published on his 60th birthday in 2008 at the same time as the first critical study of his work, Reading George Szirtes by John Sears.
Haunted by his family’s knowledge and experience of war, occupation and the Holocaust, as well as by loss, danger and exile, all of Szirtes’ poetry covers universal themes: love, desire and illusion; loyalty and betrayal; history, art and memory; humanity and truth. Throughout his work there is a conflict between two states of mind, the possibility of happiness and apprehension of disaster. These are played out especially in his celebrated long poems and extended sequences, The Photographer in Winter, Metro, The Courtyards, An English Apocalypse and Reel, all included here.
Winner of The King’s Gold Medal for Poetry, 2024
Winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize (for Reel)
A propos de l’auteur
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 Ottó Orbán, Zsuzsa Rakovszky and Ágnes Nemes Nagy. He co-edited Bloodaxe’s Hungarian anthology The Colonnade of Teeth. His Bloodaxe poetry books include: The Budapest File (2000); An English Apocalypse (2001); Reel (2004), winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize 2004; 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. Mapping the Delta (2016), another Poetry Book Society Choice, was followed by Fresh Out of the Sky (2021).
Bloodaxe has also published his Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures, Fortinbras at the Fishhouses: Responsibility, the Iron Curtain and the sense of history as knowledge (2010), and John Sears’ critical study, Reading George Szirtes (2008). His memoir of his mother, The Photographer at Sixteen (Mac Lehose Press, 2019), won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography. Szirtes lives in Norfolk and is a freelance writer, having retired from teaching at the University of East Anglia.
In December 2024 George Szirtes was named as winner of The King’s Gold Medal for Poetry, 2024.
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