George Szirtes was born in Budapest in 1948, and left Hungary after the Hungarian Uprising in 1956. His family came to London in 1966, and he trained as a painter in London and Leeds. His visits to Hungary, which began in 1984, prompted the start of his extensive translations of Hungarian literature and his own poems on Hungary and Budapest.

His collections include The Slant Door (1979), which won the Faber Memorial Prize in 1980, Short Wave (Secker and Warburg, 1984), The Photographer in Winter (Secker and Warburg, 1986), Metro (OUP,1988), Bridge Passages (OUP,1991) which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Prize, The Budapest File (Bloodaxe, 2000), a collection of poems about Hungary, and An English Apocalypse (Bloodaxe, 2001). His most recent collection, Reel, won the 2004 T. S. Eliot Prize.

He has written plays and opera libretti, works for radio, and edited The Colonnade of Teeth: Modern Hungarian Poetry with Geore Gomori (Bloodaxe, 1996). He lives in Norfolk and developed the Creative Writing degree at the Norwich School of Art and Design. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

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Related links

› More on George Szirtes

› Guardian interview with George Szirtes

› www.poetryarchive.org