Life
Born in Budapest on 29 November 1948, Szirtes came to England as a refugee in 1956 aged 8. He was brought up in London and studied Fine Art in London and Leeds.
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.
Szirtes lives in Wymondham, Norfolk, and teaches at the University of East Anglia. 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. Her interest in the city of Budapest has led to over twenty years of exploration of the city, its streets, buildings and courtyards in paintings and drawings.
Read more about this topic: George Szirtes
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