George Szirtes
1948 –
George Szirtes, a poet and translator, was born in Budapest in 1948. He immigrated to England after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.
Szirtes is the author of thirteen poetry collections, including Bad Machine (Sheep Meadow Press, 2013); The Burning of the Books (Circle Press, 2008); and Reel (Bloodaxe Books, Ltd., 2005), winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2004. He is also the author of The Photographer at Sixteen: The Death and Life of a Fighter (MacLehose Press, 2019), a memoir about his mother, which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography.
Szirtes, who has also been awarded the 2024 King’s Gold Medal for Poetry, lives in Wymondham, Norfolk, England.