George Szirtes

George Szirtes is a British-Hungarian poet and translator born in Budapest in 1948, who fled to England as a child refugee following the 1956 Hungarian Uprising. He studied fine art in London and Leeds before establishing himself as a prominent writer, winning the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2005 for his collection 'Reel' and the James Tait Black Prize for Biography in 2020 for 'The Photographer at Sixteen'. In 2024, he was awarded the King's Gold Medal for Poetry for his deeply personal work reflecting his dual East-West perspective.