George Szirtes wins The King's Gold Medal for Poetry, 2024
The King has approved the award of His Majesty’s Gold Medal for Poetry for the year 2024 to George Szirtes. The announcement was made by Buckingham Palace on 16 December 2024.
The Gold Medal for Poetry was established by King George V in 1933 and is awarded for excellence in poetry. Each year the recipient is from the United Kingdom or a Commonwealth Realm.
The Poetry Medal Committee recommended George Szirtes as the recipient of the Medal for 2024 on the basis of his deeply personal pieces of work, informed by his dual perspective, looking both east and west. He will be presented with the award at a later date.
Born in Budapest in 1948, George Szirtes came to England with his family as refugees after the Hungarian Uprising in 1956. He is now considered a major figure across the United Kingdom and beyond – he has published poetry, translations and biographies, including his 2004 poetry collection Reel, winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize 2004, and The Photographer at Sixteen (2019), a memoir of his mother which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography.
George Szirtes has established an international reputation, having published thirteen full-length collections of poetry. His poetry for adults has been published by Bloodaxe Books since 2000. The themes of his work are topical, contemporary and respond to current affairs across the world, for example, his sequence ‘In the streets of a small town’ included in his most recent collection Fresh Out of the Sky, captures the experience of the pandemic. The title sequence of that collection revisits his arrival in England as an eight-year-old child in 1956 following his escape from Hungary.
On receiving the award, George Szirtes said:
“I could not believe it when Simon Armitage shared the news. When our family came here as refugees in 1956 only my father spoke some English, although English was chronologically my second language it quickly become first in daily life. I had no notion of being a poet until one day in a school corridor, a friend showed me a poem and suddenly a door opened where there hadn’t been a door at all. I had no expectations, no background or formal teaching, so being the recipient of the King’s Gold Medal for Poetry tops everything. I am deeply grateful to those who have chosen to award me in this way, it is wonderful to join my name with all those excellent poets honoured in the past and to become, in time, part of that past myself.”
The Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage said:
“George Szirtes is a deserving recipient of the King’s Gold Medal for Poetry. For decades his crafted, observational poems have turned the spotlight on society and its values - how countries and regimes treat their people, how people operate under fluctuating political ideologies. His work and his perspectives are as relevant now as they were when he first put pen to paper, and possibly more so.”
George Szirtes was born in Budapest in 1948 and came to England with his family as refugees following the Hungarian Uprising of 1956. He went to school in London where he specialised in sciences and started writing poetry. He studied fine art in Leeds and London from 1968 to 1973. In 1970 he married fellow artist Clarissa Upchurch and together they had two children. He taught art and art history in schools through the eighties before moving to higher education in 1992 teaching creative writing, retiring from the University of East Anglia in Norwich in 2013.
His first book of poems, The Slant Door (1979), was joint winner of the Faber Prize. A selection of poems from this debut are included in George Szirtes' New & Collected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2008), along with selections from ten other books published over the previous thirty years, including his Bloodaxe titles The Budapest File (2000); An English Apocalypse (2001); and Reel (2004), winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize. This retrospective was followed by four further collections: The Burning of the Books and other poems (2009), shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2009; Bad Machine (2013), a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2013; Mapping the Delta (2016), another Poetry Book Society Choice; and Fresh Out of the Sky (2021).
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 (1996). His translation of the work of Hungarian poet Krisztina Tóth, My Secret Life: Selected Poems, is forthcoming from Bloodaxe Books in February 2025. 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).
George Szirtes has won various awards through his career in both Britain and Hungary, including T. S. Eliot Prize 2004 for his collection Reel. He has published three books for children, one of which won the CLPE Prize for poetry. He holds three honorary degrees, the last from UEA. Together with his wife Clarissa Upchurch he founded, ran and published portfolios and pamphlets of etchings and poems by other artists and poets under the imprint of The Starwheel Press. Clarissa's artwork features on all but one of the covers of his Bloodaxe poetry books.
The Gold Medal for Poetry was instituted by King George V in 1933 at the suggestion of the then Poet Laureate, John Masefield. The Medal is awarded for excellence in poetry, on the basis either of a body of work over several years, or for an outstanding poetry collection issued during the year of the award. The poet is from the United Kingdom or a Commonwealth Realm, and their poems will have been published. During Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth’s reign, the medal was known as The Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.
George Szirtes joins Selima Hill, winner of The King's Gold Medal for Poetry 2022, and the seven Bloodaxe poets who were honoured with The Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry: Grace Nichols (2021), David Constantine (2020), Gillian Allnutt (2016), Imtiaz Dharker (2014), John Agard (2012), and the late poets Fleur Adcock (2006) and R S Thomas (1964).
~~~~~
George Szirtes lives in Norfolk and is available for interview. To request digital or print review copies of his books, please email Christine Macgregor: publicity@bloodaxebooks.com.
For further information on The King's Gold Medal for Poetry, please contact Royal Communications on +44 (0)20 7930 4832.
Announcement on the Buckingham Palace website: https://www.royal.uk/news-and-activity/2024-12-16/the-kings-gold-medal-for-poetry-2024
~~~~~
A piece in Write Out Loud of 15 December 2024 includes quotes from an account by George Szirtes, first published in 1986 in Poetry Review, of his escape from Hungary and his arrival in England with his family as refugees. Read the article here.
‘Without question, George Szirtes is the most distinguished poet now living in England. Hungary’s loss was England’s gain in 1956 and those elements of Budapest Jewish life that Szirtes has reclaimed imaginatively only serve to enrich and expand England’s poetic consciousness.... Dealing with the most dreadful, dark materials, painfully honest about exile and isolation, Fresh Out of the Sky is, unexpectedly, a joyous and life-affirming work.’ – Thomas McCarthy, Dublin Review of Books
Links to this and other reviews of Fresh Out of the Sky, see: https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/news?articleid=524
~~~~~
George Szirtes was Michael Berkeley’s guest on BBC Radio 3's Private Passions on 9 May 2021. He talked about his life and work as well as his musical choices. His thirteenth collection Fresh Out of the Sky, published by Bloodaxe in October 2021, recollects his arrival in England as a child in 1956 following his dramatic escape from Hungary. Listen here.
~~~~~
George Szirtes: 'Metro'
George Szirtes reads two extracts from his long poem-sequence 'Metro' from his New & Collected Poems. This film is from the DVD-book In Person: 30 Poets, filmed by Pamela Robertson-Pearce, edited by Neil Astley, which includes several poems read by George Szirtes from his New & Collected Poems.
[16 December 2024]
