George Szirtes was born in Budapest in 1948, and came to England with his family after the 1956 Hungarian Uprising. He was educated in England, training as a painter, and has always written in English. In recent years he has worked as a translator of Hungarian literature, producing editions of poets such as Ottó Orbán, Zsuzsa Rakovszky, Ágnes Nemes Nagy and Krisztina Tóth, and novelists including the 2025 Nobel Laureate László Krasznahorkai. His translation of Hungarian poet Krisztina Tóth's retrospective My Secret Life: Selected Poems, published by Bloodaxe in February 2025, was shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2025.
He co-edited Bloodaxe’s Hungarian anthology The Colonnade of Teeth. His Bloodaxe poetry books include: The Budapest File (2000); An English Apocalypse (2001); Reel (2004), winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize 2004; New & Collected Poems (2008) and The Burning of the Books and other poems (2009), shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2009. Bad Machine (2013) was a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2013. Mapping the Delta (2016), another Poetry Book Society Choice, was followed by Fresh Out of the Sky (2021). In December 2024 George Szirtes was awarded The King's Gold Medal for Poetry, 2024. He was presented with the medal by King Charles III at Buckingham Palace in November 2025.
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.
George Szirtes is a nominee for the inaugural Norwich City of Literature Award in the 2025 East Anglian Book Awards. This new award honours individuals or organisations making an outstanding contribution to the region’s literary life. The winner will be chosen by public vote, open to residents of Eastern England. The vote closes 10am on 12 December 2025.
