George Szirtes

George Szirtes (born 29 November 1948) 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.

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 Fellowhsip from Goldsmiths College, University of London and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of East Anglia.

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.

He also won the Poetry and the People Award in Guangzhou, China in 2016.

Szirtes was a judge for the 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize.

In 2019 he was a contributor to A New Divan: A Lyrical Dialogue between East and West (Gingko Library).