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George Szirtes
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When I was a child their enormous sails blustered in fierce city wind. They were my mother in ghostly dress when the wind tugged at her dark hair. She flew with the sheets, skirts flapping and half our clothes flying off with her in sheets of laughter. |
George Szirtes’s first book of poems, The Slant Door (1979 ) was joint-winner of the Faber Prize. He has published many since then, his collection, Reel, winning the T S Eliot Prize in 2004 for which he has been twice shortlisted since. His latest is Mapping the Delta (Bloodaxe 2016) was a Poetry Book Society Choice. His memoir of his mother, The Photographer at Sixteen, was published by MacLehose in February 2019. and won the East Anglian Book Prize for Memoir and Biography and was or is shortlisted for four other prizes. His many translations from Hungarian include László Krasznahorkai’s Satantango, Krasznahorkai won the Man Booker International in 2015 for which Szirtes shared the translator’s prize with Ottilie Mulzet. Married to artist Clarissa Upchurch, he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the English Association. He retired from the University of East Anglia in 2013.
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