Like a Black Bird

George Szirtes was born in Budapest in 1948 and came to England as a refugee with his parents and younger brother following the Hungarian Uprising of 1956. He grew up in London and trained as a painter in Leeds and London. He is the author of some fifteen books of poetry, roughly the same of translation from Hungarian. His first, The Slant Door (1979) was joint winner of the Faber Memorial Prize. In 2004 he won the T.S. Eliot Prize for Reel, and was shortlisted for the prize again in 2009 for The Burning of the Books and for Bad Machine (2013). His translations from Hungarian have won various international prizes such as the Best Translated Book Award in the USA for László Krasznahorkai’s Satantango (2013) which also received the translator’s prize in the Man Booker International 2014, and his latest book for children, In the Land of the Giants won the CLPE Prize for best collection of poetry for children, also in 2013. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in the UK and of the Szécheny Academy of Arts and Letters in Hungary. His latest book of poems is Mapping the Delta (2016).