George Szirtes
George Szirtes (; born 29 November 1948) is a Hungarian-born British poet, writing in English, as well as a translator from the Hungarian language into English. He has lived in the United Kingdom for most of his life.
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 for poems in Poetry magazine, 2008. His translations from Hungarian poetry, fiction and drama have also won numerous awards.
