George Szirtes

Country: Hungary
Language: Hungarian
Year of birth: 1948

was born in Hungary in 1948, but fled during the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 to England, where he studied at the art academies of London and Leeds before establishing himself as a painter. In addition, he wrote poetry. His first collection The Slant Door, written in his adopted mother tongue, appeared in 1979.
In Szirtes’ work you can clearly sense the tension between his continental European background and English culture, which sometimes seems difficult to reconcile. It is no coincidence that he wrote separately The Budapest File (2000) and The English Apocalypse (2001).
Furthermore, his background as a pictorial artist also have a role in his poetry – there is often a striking visual component. He himself refers to them as buildings and, via the use of metre and rhyme, he gives them strong formal characteristics. In his most recent collection, Reel (2004), he also includes sonnets and poems in three-line stanzas. They stand out in English literature because of their very light, hard to localise accent.
His poems often have an unsettling side-effect – they seem to cast a covert look at the end of time. Critics have sometimes seen a link between his work and that of Kafka. Take for example the poem ‘Yellow Star’ – based on a photograph, where the birth of Christ is linked in an intriguing and suggestive manner with the holocaust. Szirkes also finds apocalyptical characteristics in present-day culture. The poem ‘Arrival’. or example, where the reader is led into a deathly quiet town, is such a typical Szirtes poem – full of alienation and homelessness. Often you do not really know what is going on, but you feel a subdued tension.
Apart from being a poet and a painter, Szirtes is also active as a write of plays and libretti, and as a translator of Hungarian literature. He also teaches at the Norwich School of Art and Design and the University of East Anglia. He has been awarded various prizes for his work.

Biography on Poetry International Web