Overview

George Szirtes came to England as an eight-year-old refugee fleeing with his family after the Hungarian uprising. His prevous book The Budapest File brought together his poems on Hungarian themes, exploring universal issues of loss, danger and exile. An English Apocalypse presents the poetry he has written from the other side, as an English Hungarian writer who grew up with ambiguous feelings towards his adoptive country. Szirtes’s England seems to mirror his own split personality: a place and people he loves and needs to love, yet which also prompts anxiety and unease, frustration and even indifference. As both outsider and insider, a writer who views his two countries from a distance as well as with intimate knowledge and delicate understanding. England possesses his imagination as powerfully as his almost unreachable, native city in The Budapest File – disturbingly real yet also phantasmagorical, a spectral country living out its past, its people haunted by failure and disappointment. Over half the poems in An English Apocalypse are completely new. In the title-sequence – a work of breathtaking originality – Szirtes takes us inside his love-hate relationship with the country which enthrals him before England goes down with all hands like the Titanic at Armageddon. This edition is now out of print with all the work it includes now part of Szirtes' New & Collected Poems.

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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 such writers as Ottó Orbán, Zsuzsa Rakovszky and Ágnes Nemes Nagy. 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; 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. His latest collection, Mapping the Delta (2016), was the Poetry Book Society Choice for Winter 2016. A new collection, Fresh Out of the Sky, is forthcoming from Bloodaxe in 2021. 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, was published by MacLehose Press in 2019. Szirtes lives in Norfolk and is a freelance writer, having retired from teaching at the University of East Anglia.

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