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.**RADIO 4''s BOOK OF THE WEEK FROM 15 March 2021**"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, George Szirtes'' mother, Magda, died in an ambulance, on her way to hospital after attempting to take her own life. She was fifty-one years old. This memoir is an attempt to make sense of what came before, to re-construct who Magda Szirtes really was. The Photographer at Sixteen moves from her death, spooling backwards through her years as a mother, through sickness and exile in England, the family''s flight from Hungary in 1956, her time in two concentration camps, her girlhood as an ambitious photographer and her vanished family in Transylvania.The woman who emerges, fleetingly, fragmentarily - with her absolutism, her contradictions, her beauty - is utterly captivating. What were the terrors and obsessions that drove her? The Photographer at Sixteen reveals a life that is at Magda Szirtes from the depths of the end to the comparable safety of the photographer''s studio where she first appears as a small child. It is a book born of curiosity, guilt and love.

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 was published on his 60th birthday in 2008 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; 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.

Winner of The King''s Gold Medal for Poetry, 2024

Winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize (for Reel)

Poetry Book Society Choice.

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.

Fresh Out of the Sky is a book of songs, dreams, laments, narratives and comedies 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 George Szirtes'' earlier books, such as those about his early Budapest childhood explored in Reel, and about growing to adulthood in England in An English Apocalypse. Here the theme is his arrival in England as a child in 1956.

These are followed by the second part of The Yellow Room, a continuing poem of impossible questions about identity as residual Jewishness, in the form of a dialogue with Szirtes'' late father.

After that there is a brief section of bridging poems set in the aftermath of war, upheaval and life in contemporary England that leads to Going Viral, a substantial section of ten-line poems, divided into brief chapters, presenting dreamlike reports from the Covid bunkers we have all been inhabiting and ending on occasions of consolation, delight and joy in the midst of darkness and uncertainty.

The book then moves, by way of five interludes, from one dreamlike experience to another, in the form of nine dream songs set in an unstable social and political landscape.

The last section steps from dream to a bestiary of transformations woven through Guillaume Apollinaire and Graham Sutherland.

Winner of The King''s Gold Medal for Poetry, 2024