George Szirtes – författare

A poet's memoir of his mother that flows backwards through time, through a tumultuous period of European history - a tender and yet unsparing autobiographical journey.**A RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK**"A truly remarkable book . . . fiercely compelling" EDMUND DE WAAL*WINNER OF THE JAMES TAIT BLACK MEMORIAL PRIZE* *SHORTLISTED FOR THE JEWISH WINGATE PRIZE*"I've read no memoir that moved me more" MIRANDA SEYMOUR"The writing is always scrupulous . . . [a] compelling memoir" BLAKE MORRISON"Beautifully written and utterly compelling" Sunday Times"An original, probingly thoughtful memoir" EVA HOFFMANNIn July 1975, Magda Szirtes died in the ambulance on the way to hospital after she had tried to take her own life. She was fifty-one years old. The Photographer at Sixteen spools into the past, through her exile in England, her flight with her husband and two young boys from Hungary in 1956 and her time in two concentration camps, her girlhood as an ambitious photographer, and the unknowable fate of her vanished family in Transylvania.The woman who emerges - with all her contradictions - is utterly captivating. What were the terrors and obsessions that drove her? The Photographer at Sixteen reveals a life from the depths of its final days to the comparable safety of its childhood. It is a book born of curiosity, of guilt and of love.

Each year, the best books of poetry published in English internationally and in Canada are honoured with the Griffin Poetry Prize, one of the world’s most prestigious and richest literary awards. Since 2001 this annual prize has tremendously spurred interest in and recognition of poetry, focusing worldwide attention on the formidable talent of poets writing in English and works in translation. Each year The Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology features the work of the extraordinary poets shortlisted for the awards and introduces us to some of the finest poems in their collections.Royalties generated from The 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology will be donated to UNESCO’s World Poetry Day, which was created to support linguistic diversity through poetic expression and to offer endangered languages the opportunity to be heard in their communities.Shortlist announced: April 11, 2017Readings: June 7, 2017Prizes awarded: June 8, 2017

The Delta is a densely populated place. Whole countries inhabit it, exercising their powers and authority, presenting their offers of complicity and compliance. Individuals move through the night and come upon themselves in its mirrors. Dreamers and fantasists repopulate its hidden corners: Rimbaud, Bruno Schultz, William Blake, Arthur Schnitzler and the physicist Dennis Gabor lay claim to their own visions of it. Animals gaze at their human companions who gaze back. They try to puzzle each other out, looking to climb into each other's eyes. They court each other, desire their own species, are captivated both by each other's and their own beauty. Life goes on its desultory way, finding itself between creeks and cracks. And occasionally the world does crack open. Planes crash, boats sink, weather changes, floodwaters rise, people vanish on journeys. Anxiety remains: disaster zones persist into old age and death, and into the life, death and resurrection of language itself. At the core of the book is The Yellow Room, a sequence of mirror poems contemplating the Jewishness of the poet's father. The room constricts and glows.The poem breaks up across the page at intervals then reassembles into its mirrors. Many of the poems are formal haiku sequences. They are new parts of a personal Delta. Others are in rhymed and broken stanzas. The Delta has to survive - if it survives at all - on its broken patterns. Poetry Book Society Choice.

Fresh Out of the Sky is a book of songs, dreams, laments, narratives and comedies intertwined with passages about major life changes involving country, identity and belonging. It is about perpetually standing at the edge of change, anticipating it, reflecting on it and dreaming about it. The title sequence of the book returns to the terza rima theme of memory, following sequences in his earlier books, such as those about early Budapest childhood explored in Reel, and about growing to adulthood in England in An English Apocalypse. Here the theme is arrival in England as a child in 1956.These are wound around poems set in the aftermath of war, upheaval, and life in contemporary England as tracked by a series of dreamlike reports from the Covid bunkers we have been inhabiting. Covid poems run through the collection like a thread holding the book – and indeed the condition of England – together. The thread embraces the second part of The Yellow Room, a continuing poem of impossible questions about residual Jewishness experienced as a dialogue with the poet’s late father, as well as a bestiary of transformations woven through Guillaume Apollinaire and Graham Sutherland. The book ends on occasions of consolation, delight and joy in the midst of darkness and uncertainty.

George Szirtes came to Britain as an eight-year-old refugee after the Hungarian Uprising in 1956. Educated in England, he trained as a painter, and has always written in English. This comprehensive retrospective of his work covers poetry from over a dozen collections written over four decades, with a substantial gathering of new poems. It is published on his 60th birthday at the same time as the first critical study of his work, "Reading George Szirtes" by John Sears. Haunted by his family's knowledge and experience of war, occupation and the Holocaust, as well as by loss, danger and exile, all of Szirtes' poetry covers universal themes: love, desire and illusion; loyalty and betrayal; history, art and memory; and, humanity and truth. Throughout his work there is a conflict between two states of mind, the possibility of happiness and apprehension of disaster. These are played out especially in his celebrated long poems and extended sequences, "The Photographer in Winter", "Metro", "The Courtyards", "An English Apocalypse" and "Reel", all included here.

The title-poem of George Szirtes' "The Burning of the Books and Other Poems" is the core of this collection of narrative sequences by a writer who came to Britain as a child refugee after the Hungarian Uprising. Book burning is associated with the Nazis' burning of what they considered to be subversive books in 1933, but the practice has a long history, right down to our own day. In this particular case the burning refers to the library of Kien, the scholar, in Elias Canetti's novel "Auto Da Fé". The poems follow and expand from the events of Canetti's book in a variety of forms not previously used by Szirtes. Two further sequences are concerned with history and documentary, one about the discovery of small snippets of film recording the liberation of Penig concentration camp where Szirtes' mother was imprisoned, and another of songs concerning war and documentary photography. There are also prose poems, monologues, a series of canzoni, a group of poems exploring the origins of love in childhood, and another based on the mythical travels of Sir John Mandeville about the Hungarian Uprising of 1956. The book, as a whole, constitutes an exploration of the range and flexibility of a voice attuned to the patterns of history and the way such patterns transform our sense of the present. Poetry Book Society Recommendation, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.

In this innovative series of public lectures at Newcastle University, leading contemporary poets speak about the craft and practice of poetry to audiences drawn from both the city and the university. The lectures are then published in book form by Bloodaxe, giving readers everywhere the opportunity to learn what the poets themselves think about their own subject. George Szirtes' three lectures form an arc on the nature of historical knowledge in the poem. 'Our knowledge' says Elizabeth Bishop in 'At the Fishhouses', 'is historical, flowing and flown.' The sea in her poem is so cold it burns hand and tongue, a parodox explored in his first lecture, 'Cold dark deep and absolutely clear: poetic knowledge as uncertainty'. Beginning with this understanding of knowledge, his second lecture, 'Life is Elsewhere: knowing in opposition', shifts to notions of historical responsibility, especially as perceived by poets in the West at the time of the Cold War. Szirtes considers questions of betrayal and fidelity and the role of irony and quietism. In his third lecture, 'Flowing and flown: in the world of superfluous knowledge', Szirtes seeks exemplars and connections in works by George Seferis, Derek Mahon and poets of Eastern Europe from the period immediately before 1989 as well as briefly afterwards, to enquire into the nature of repression, returning to Bishop's story 'In the Village' for its conclusion, where 'The hammer echoes with the icy black sea. Cold, dark deep and absolutely clear' ending with Bishop's affirming cry: 'Oh beautiful sound, strike again!'

The prize-winning poet and translator George Szirtes has selected work from eleven of Hungary's leading young poets for this bi-lingual anthology, the publication of which coincides with the twentieth anniversary of the destruction of the Berlin Wall. This is the first major anthology of Hungarian poetry of this generation. Contributors include: István Kemény (b.1961), Szilárd Borbély (b.1964), András Imreh (b.1966), Mónika Mesterházi (b.1967), Krisztina Tóth (b.1967), Virág Erdos (b.1968), Jáos Térey (b.1970), G. István László (b.1972) and Anna T Szabó (b.1972).Plus UK poets/translators Owen Sheers, Anthony Dunn, Clare Pollard, Matthew Hollis and Agnes Lehoczky."... if a lively and different way with words and imagination and risk is to be brought into original English writing, here's a fine push towards it."David Hart, StrideGeorge Szirtes was born in Budapest in 1948. His first book, The Slant Door was published in 1979 and won the Faber Memorial prize the following year. He has published several books and won various other prizes including the T. S. Eliot Prize for Reel in 2005.

Celebrating an increasingly interesting form that concentrates short prose pieces with the techniques of poetry brought to bear, this is the first anthology of its kind in the UK and features well known proponents of the prose poetry form such as George Szirtes and Pascale Petit, as well as emerging voices. -- Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru

56 is a collaboration between two poets from very different literary traditions whose ears are tuned to a mutual music. With a painting by Jenny Saville as a starting point, this collaboration grew into a sequence of 56 poems which, by coincidence, was begun fifty-six years after 1956, the year in which George Szirtes came to England.

This posthumously published retrospection covers Downie's collections A Strange Here (1977) and Plainsong (1981) along with a larger number of previously uncollected poems.‘Geoffrey Grigson, who gave his approval to very few new poets, greeted A Stranger Here, Freda Downie’s first collection, as “a better book of new poems than any I have read for years… She writes as if she had been – intermittently – working away for ages, getting it better and better”.‘Although Freda Downie was to publish only one more full book before her death in 1993, the equally well received Plainsong, she continued, as Grigson said, to get it better and better. Because she was shy of publishing she received less of the limelight than she might have had, but nevertheless, her work in anthologies has always drawn admiring critical attention. Her readers would certainly agree that she wrote no bad poems. Furthermore, they would propose, few contemporary poets have written with such sad luminosity.‘Indeed, her poetry is one of sharp distillations: single figures in social landscapes moving between yearning and disappointment, between fear and the desire of oblivion, listening and watching everything intently with a witty, even humorous attention. These figures know their manners but are conscious of their eccentricity and of the mire and fury of human veins implicit in manners; they also know that the clearer, sharper and suddener the danger of oblivion, the sharper, clearer and intenser the poem that sense of danger animates.‘With something of Stevie Smith’s melancholy, an element of Jane Austen’s precision and the clarity of Grigson himself at his best, Freda Downie remains all the time inimitably herself. More than that, this volume of her collected poems will show her to have been one of the most poignant and memorable poets of our time.' – George Szirtes.