George Szirtes

George Szirtes is a British poet and translator from the Hungarian language into English. Originally from Hungary, he has lived in the United Kingdom for most of his life after coming to the country as a refugee at the age of eight. Szirtes was a judge for the 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize. In 2024 he was awarded the King's Gold Medal for Poetry.

Life

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.
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.

Prizes and honours

1980 – Faber Memorial Prize for The Slant Door
1982 – Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature
1984 – Arts Council Travelling Scholarship
1986 – Cholmondeley Prize
1990 – Déry Prize for Translation The Tragedy of Man
1991 – Gold Star of the Hungarian Republic
1992 – Shortlisted for Whitbread Poetry Prize for Bridge Passages
1995 – European Poetry Translation Prize for New Life
1996 – Shortlisted for Aristeion Translation Prize New Life
1999 – Sony Bronze Award, 1999 – for contribution to BBC Radio Three, Danube programmes
1999 – Shortlisted for Weidenfeld Prize for The Adventures of Sindbad
2000 – Shortlisted for Forward Prize Single Poem: Norfolk Fields
2002 – George Cushing Prize for Anglo-Hungarian Cultural Relations
2002 – Society of Authors Travelling Scholarship
2003 – Leverhulme Research Fellowship
2004 – Pro Cultura Hungarica medal
2004 – T. S. Eliot Prize, for Reel
2005 – Shortlisted for Weidenfeld Prize for the Night of Akhenaton
2005 – Shortlisted for Popescu Prize for The Night of Akhenaton
2005 – PEN Translation Fund Grant from PEN American Center
2006 – Ovid Prize, Romania
2008 – Bess Hokin Prize Poetry Foundation
2009 – Shortlisted for T S Eliot Prize for The Burning of the Books and Other Poems
2013 – CLPE Prize for in the Land if the Giants, poems for children
2013 – Shortlisted for T S Eliot Prize for Bad Machine
2013 – Best Translated Book Award, winner, Satantango
2015 – Man Booker International winner, as translator of László Krasznahorkai
2016 – Poetry and People Prize
2020 – Shortlisted for the PEN/Ackerley Prize for The Photographer at Sixteen
2020 – Winner of James Tait Black Prize for Biography, for The Photographer at Sixteen
2024 – King's Gold Medal for Poetry
2025 – Shortlisted Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, for My Secret Life by Krisztina Tóth

• 2025 László Krasznahorkai awarded Nobel Prize for Literature. Translators, George Szirtes, Ottilie Mulzet and John Bátki

Works

Poetry collections

Poetry Introduction 4 with Craig Raine, Alan Hollinghurst, Alistair Elliott, Anne Cluysenaar and Cal Clothier
The Slant Door
November and May
Short Wave
The Photographer in Winter
Metro
Bridge Passages
Blind Field
Selected Poems
The Red All Over Riddle Book
Portrait of my Father in an English Landscape
The Budapest File
An English Apocalypse
A Modern Bestiary with artist Ana Maria Pacheco
Reel
New and Collected Poems
Shuck, Hick, Tiffey – Three libretti for children, with Ken Crandell
The Burning of the Books
The Burning of the Books and Other Poems
In the Land of the Giants – for children
Bad Machine
Bad Machine
Mapping the Delta
The Children
Fresh Out of the Sky
Selected poems in Hungarian, Chinese, Italian, German and Romanian

Memoir

''The Photographer at Sixteen''

Translation

Imre Madách: The Tragedy of Man, verse play
Sándor Csoóri: Barbarian Prayer. Selected Poems
István Vas: Through the Smoke. Selected Poems
Dezsö Kosztolányi: Anna Édes. Novel.
Ottó Orbán: The Blood of the Walsungs. Selected Poems
Zsuzsa Rakovszky: New Life. Selected Poems
The Colonnade of Teeth: Twentieth Century Hungarian Poetry
The Lost Rider: Hungarian Poetry 16–20th Century, an anthology, editor and chief translator
Gyula Krúdy: The Adventures of Sindbad short stories
László Krasznahorkai: The Melancholy of Resistance
The Night of Akhenaton: Selected Poems of Ágnes Nemes Nagy
Sándor Márai: Conversation in Bolzano
László Krasznahorkai: War and War
Sándor Márai: The Rebels
Ferenc Karinthy: Metropole
Sándor Márai: Portraits of a Marriage
Yudit Kiss: The Summer My Father Died
László Krasznahorkai: Satantango
Magda Szabó: ''Iza's Ballad''

Poetry set to music

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.

As editor

The Collected Poems of Freda Downie
The Colonnade of Teeth: Modern Hungarian Poetry, co-edited with George Gömöri
New Writing 10, Anthology of new writing co-edited with Penelope Lively
An Island of Sound: Hungarian fiction and poetry at the point of change, co-edited with Miklós Vajda
New Order: Hungarian Poets of the Post-1989 Generation
In Their Own Words: Contemporary Poets on Their Poetry, co-edited with Helen Ivory

Recordings

The Poetry Quartets 6, with Moniza Alvi, Michael Donaghy and Anne Stevenson
George Szirtes