Awards

• Winner of T S Eliot Prize 2004
• Winner of T S Eliot Prize 2004.

Overview

George Szirtes came to England as an eight-year-old refugee after the Hungarian uprising. His two earlier Bloodaxe selections The Budapest File and An English Apocalypse brought together his poems on Hungarian and English themes. In this later collection, Reel, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, the exile's obsessive quest for the nature of humane truth is the focus of poems of visionary sweep which pan out across a life. Memory is film in Reel: a film-crew shoot Budapest for Berlin; faces float like light on the sea; names appear and disappear on a search engine. George Szirtes reconstructs childhood from a confusion of memories, photographs and stories in which men and women change places and fathers multiply. There are sequences on love, desire and illusion, poems about political loyalties, and poems that form ghost texts shadowing other writers. Reel is now includes in his New & Collected Poems.

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9781852246761

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Reviews

'A brilliantly virtuosic collection of deeply felt poems concerned with the personal impact of the dislocations and betrayals of history.' T S Eliot judges '[The T S Eliot judges were] impressed by the unusual degree of formal pressure exerted by Szirtes on his themes of memory and the impossibility of forgetting.' 'A major contribution to post-war literature...Using a painter-like collage of images to retrieve lost times, lives, cities and betrayed hopes, Szirtes weaves his personal and historical themes into work of profound psychological complexity' - anne stevenson, Poetry Review 'Szirtes is increasingly revealed as a major English poet - one of those in whom insight and technique combine to focus more and more productively as the years go by' - hugh macpherson, Poetry Review 'The calm clarity of his poetry is classical in the only worthwhile sense: that it gives lasting utterance to experiences which poetry must engage with if it is to speak in dead earnest to the betrayed world'- john lucas, New Statesman.

Author Information

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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