George Szirtes & Selima Hill presented with The King's Gold Medal for Poetry 2024 & 2022
Bloodaxe poets George Szirtes and Selima Hill were both presented with The King's Gold Medal for Poetry during an audience with His Majesty King Charles III at Buckingham Palace on Wednesday 26 November 2025. They were awarded medals for the years 2024 and 2022 respectively. The UK Poet Laureate, Professor Simon Armitage, was also present. The recipient of The King’s Gold Medal for 2023, Mimi Khalvati, was unable to attend as she was unwell.
The King’s Gold Medal, established by George V in 1933, is awarded each year for excellence in poetry to recipients from the UK or the Commonwealth. Selima Hill was the first poet to receive the Gold Medal for Poetry in The King’s name since His Majesty’s Accession.
George Szirtes and Selima Hill have been published by Bloodaxe Books since 2000 and 1989 respectively, with retrospectives of their work published in the same year, 2008.
George Szirtes was chosen by the Poetry Medal Committee which recommended him on the basis of his deeply personal work, informed by his dual perspective, looking east and west.
The Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage, said:
'George Szirtes is a deserving recipient of the King’s Gold Medal for Poetry. For decades his crafted, observational poems have turned the spotlight on society and its values - how countries and regimes treat their people, how people operate under fluctuating political ideologies. His work and his perspectives are as relevant now as they were when he first put pen to paper, and possibly more so.'
George Szirtes was born in Budapest in 1948 and moved to England with his family as refugees in 1956 after the Hungarian Uprising. His 2008 Bloodaxe retrospective New & Collected Poems includes his collection Reel, winner of the TS Eliot Prize 2004. His most recent poetry collection is Fresh Out of the Sky (2021). The title sequence of that collection revisits his arrival in England as an eight-year-old child following his family's escape from Hungary.
Selima Hill was recommended for The King's Gold Medal for Poetry for the year 2022 on the basis of her body of work and flourishing creativity, with special recognition for Gloria: Selected Poems, a compilation from her first ten collections, published by Bloodaxe Books in 2008.
The Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage, commented:
'Selima Hill is an inimitable talent. The mind is fragile and unreliable in her poetry, but is also tenacious and surprising, capable of the most extraordinary responses, always fighting back with language as its survival kit. Life in general might be said to be her subject, the complications, contradictions and consequences of simply existing. Nevertheless, Hill’s writing is eminently readable and approachable, even fun at times, the voice of a person and a poet who will not be quieted and will not conform to expectations, especially poetic ones.'
Selima Hill published her first book of poems, Saying Hello At The Station, in 1984. Her retrospective Gloria: Selected Poems was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2008. This brings together work from her first ten collections, including her Whitbread Poetry Award-winning Bunny. She has since published eleven further collections, with 22nd book of poetry, A Man, a Woman and Hippopotamus, published in October 2025.
The Gold Medal for Poetry was instituted by King George V in 1933 at the suggestion of the then Poet Laureate, John Masefield. The Medal is awarded for excellence in poetry, on the basis either of a body of work over several years, or for an outstanding poetry collection issued during the year of the award. The poet is from the United Kingdom or a Commonwealth Realm, and their poems will have been published. During Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth’s reign, the medal was known as The Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. The redesigned medal features The King on the front and has images of the poets Sappho and Homer on the reverse side.
George Szirtes, awarded The King's Gold Medal for Poetry for the year 2024, joined Selima Hill, winner of The King's Gold Medal for Poetry for 2022, and the seven Bloodaxe poets who were honoured with The Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry: Grace Nichols (2021), David Constantine (2020), Gillian Allnutt (2016), Imtiaz Dharker (2014), John Agard (2012), and the late poets Fleur Adcock (2006) and R S Thomas (1964).
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To request digital or print review copies of books by George Szirtes or Selima Hill, please email Christine Macgregor: publicity@bloodaxebooks.com.
For further information on The King's Gold Medal for Poetry, please contact Royal Communications on +44 (0)20 7930 4832.
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George Szirtes was born in Budapest in 1948 and came to England with his family as refugees following the Hungarian Uprising of 1956. He went to school in London where he specialised in sciences and started writing poetry. He studied fine art in Leeds and London from 1968 to 1973. In 1970 he married fellow artist Clarissa Upchurch and together they had two children. He taught art and art history in schools through the eighties before moving to higher education in 1992 teaching creative writing, retiring from the University of East Anglia in Norwich in 2013.
His first book of poems, The Slant Door (1979), was joint winner of the Faber Prize. A selection of poems from this debut are included in George Szirtes' New & Collected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2008), along with selections from ten other books published over the previous thirty years, including his Bloodaxe titles The Budapest File (2000); An English Apocalypse (2001); and Reel (2004), winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize. This retrospective was followed by four further collections: The Burning of the Books and other poems (2009), shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2009; Bad Machine (2013), a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2013; Mapping the Delta (2016), another Poetry Book Society Choice; and Fresh Out of the Sky (2021).
In recent years he has worked as a translator of Hungarian literature, producing editions of such writers as Ottó Orbán, Zsuzsa Rakovszky and Ágnes Nemes Nagy. He co-edited Bloodaxe’s Hungarian anthology The Colonnade of Teeth (1996). His translation of the work of Hungarian poet Krisztina Tóth, My Secret Life: Selected Poems, was published by Bloodaxe Books in February 2025, and was shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 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).
George Szirtes has won various awards through his career in both Britain and Hungary, including T. S. Eliot Prize 2004 for his collection Reel. He has published three books for children, one of which won the CLPE Prize for poetry. He holds three honorary degrees, the last from UEA. Together with his wife Clarissa Upchurch he founded, ran and published portfolios and pamphlets of etchings and poems by other artists and poets under the imprint of The Starwheel Press. Clarissa's artwork features on all but one of the covers of his Bloodaxe poetry books.
George Szirtes lives in Norfolk and is available for interview.
Announcement on the Buckingham Palace website: https://www.royal.uk/news-and-activity/2024-12-16/the-kings-gold-medal-for-poetry-2024
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Selima Hill grew up in a family of painters in farms in England and Wales, and has lived in Dorset for the past 40 years. She received a Cholmondeley Award in 1986, and was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Exeter University in 2003-06. She won first prize in the Arvon International Poetry Competition with part of The Accumulation of Small Acts of Kindness (1989), one of several extended sequences in Gloria: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2008), which includes work from ten collections including Bunny (2001), winner of the Whitbread Poetry Award. She has published eleven further collections from Bloodaxe, most recently Men Who Feed Pigeons (2021), which was shortlisted for the 2021 Forward Prize for Best Collection, the 2021 T.S. Eliot Prize, and the Rathbones Folio Prize 2022, and Women in Comfortable Shoes (2023). Her 22nd second book of poetry, A Man, a Woman and Hippopotamus, was published by Bloodaxe in October 2025.
Selima Hill is unavailable for interview. Please contact Bloodaxe Books if you would like suggestions for people who would be able to write about her work.
Announcement on the Buckingham Palace website: https://www.royal.uk/kings-gold-medal-poetry-2022
[27 November 2025]
