George Szirtes was born in Budapest in 1948 and came to England as a refugee in 1956. He was brought up in London and studied Fine Art in London and Leeds. He has published many books and won various prizes including the T. S. Eliot Prize for Reel (Bloodaxe Books) in 2005. Beside his work in poetry and translation, he has written Exercise of Power, a study of the artist Ana Maria Pacheco, and, together with his wife, the painter Clarissa Upchurch, ran The Starwheel Press. Bad Machine (Bloodaxe Books)was the Poetry Book Society Choice in Spring 2013 and shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize that year.
His publications since then include Mapping the Delta (2016), another Poetry Book Society Choice, and Fresh Out of the Sky (2021), both Bloodaxe. 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 (MacLehose 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. He was awarded The King’s Gold Medal for Poetry, 2024.
