George Szirtes

In 2024 he was awarded the King's Gold Medal for Poetry.

The recorded working language is English and Hungarian. The field of work recorded is children's book, translation from English and translation into Hungarian. Residence is recorded at Wymondham. Employment is recorded with University of East Anglia. Distinctions recorded are Cholmondeley Award, Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, T. Eliot Prize and Best Translated Book Award.

• Name — George Szirtes • Born — 29 November 1948 • Birthplace — Budapest, Hungary • Occupation — Writer • Years Active — 1973–present • Spouse — Clarissa Upchurch • Children — 2

Born in Budapest on 29 November 1948, Szirtes came to England as a refugee in 1956 aged 8. After a few days in an army camp followed by three months in an off-season boarding house on the Kent coast, along with other Hungarian refugees, his family moved to London, where he was brought up and went to school, then studied fine art in London and Leeds. Among his teachers at Leeds was the poet Martin Bell. His poems began appearing in national magazines in 1973, and his first book, The Slant Door, was published in 1979. It won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize the following year. He has won a variety of prizes for his work, most recently the 2004 T. S. Eliot Prize, for his collection Reel, and the Bess Hokin Prize in 2008 for poems in Poetry magazine. His translations from Hungarian poetry, fiction and drama have also won numerous awards. He has received an Honorary Fellowship from Goldsmiths College, University of London and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of East Anglia. He also won the Poetry and the People Award in Guangzhou, China in 2016. In 2019 he was a contributor to A New Divan: A Lyrical Dialogue between East and West (Gingko Library). He is one of three editors of the Poems on the Underground project, along with Judith Chernaik and Imtiaz Dharker. Szirtes lives in Wymondham, Norfolk, having retired from teaching at the University of East Anglia in 2013. He is married to the artist Clarissa Upchurch, with whom he ran The Starwheel Press and who has been responsible for most of his book jacket images.

• The Photographer at Sixteen (MacLehose Press, 2019)

• Imre Madách: The Tragedy of Man, verse play (Corvina / Puski, 1989) • Sándor Csoóri: Barbarian Prayer. Selected Poems (part translator, Corvina 1989) • István Vas: Through the Smoke. Selected Poems (editor and part translator, Corvina, 1989) • Dezső Kosztolányi: Anna Édes. Novel. (Quartet, 1991) • Ottó Orbán: The Blood of the Walsungs. Selected Poems (editor and majority translator, Bloodaxe, 1993) • Zsuzsa Rakovszky: New Life. Selected Poems (editor and translator, OUP March 1994) • The Colonnade of Teeth: Twentieth Century Hungarian Poetry (anthology, co-editor and translator, Bloodaxe 1996) • The Lost Rider: Hungarian Poetry 16–20th Century, an anthology, editor and chief translator (Corvina, 1998) • Gyula Krúdy: The Adventures of Sindbad short stories (CEUP, 1999) • László Krasznahorkai: The Melancholy of Resistance (Quartet, 1999) • The Night of Akhenaton: Selected Poems of Ágnes Nemes Nagy (editor-translator, Bloodaxe, 2003) • Sándor Márai: Conversation in Bolzano (Knopf / Random House, 2004) • László Krasznahorkai: War and War (New Directions, 2005) • Sándor Márai: The Rebels (Knopf / Random House, 2007; Vintage / Picador, 2008) • Ferenc Karinthy: Metropole (Telegram, 2008 • Sándor Márai: Esther's Inheritance (Knopf / Random House, 2008) • Sándor Márai: Portraits of a Marriage (Knopf / Random House, 2011) • Yudit Kiss: The Summer My Father Died (Telegram, 2012) • László Krasznahorkai: Satantango (New Directions, 2012) • Magda Szabó: Iza's Ballad (Harvill Secker, 2014)

• The Flight, set to music by Richard Causton (composer), as a commission for A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, at King's College, Cambridge.

• The Collected Poems of Freda Downie (Bloodaxe 1995) • The Colonnade of Teeth: Modern Hungarian Poetry, co-edited with George Gömöri (Bloodaxe 1997) • New Writing 10, Anthology of new writing co-edited with Penelope Lively (Picador, 2001) • An Island of Sound: Hungarian fiction and poetry at the point of change, co-edited with Miklós Vajda (Harvill, 2004) • New Order: Hungarian Poets of the Post-1989 Generation (Arc, 2010) • In Their Own Words: Contemporary Poets on Their Poetry, co-edited with Helen Ivory (Salt, 2012)