George Szirtes to be awarded King's Gold Medal for Poetry
The Hungarian-born poet George Szirtes, who came to England as a boy with his family following the Hungarian uprising and Soviet clampdown in 1956, is to be awarded the King’s Gold Medal for Poetry.
The Gold Medal for Poetry was established in 1933 by King George V. George Szirtes is to be given the medal for “his deeply personal pieces of work, informed by his dual perspective, looking both east and west”.
George Szirtes won the TS Eliot prize for his 2004 collection Reel, later included in New & Collected Poems. This retrospective was followed by The Burning of the Books and other poems (2009), shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize 2009, Bad Machine (2013) shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize 2013, and Mapping the Delta (2016). A new collection, Fresh Out of the Sky, was published by Bloodaxe in October 2021.
His memoir of his mother, The Photographer at Sixteen (MacLehose Press, 2019), won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography.
On receiving the award, he 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 … I had no notions 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.”
In a lengthy article for Poetry Review, published in 1986, George Szirtes wrote about his family’s flight to England. His mother had lost all her family during the war, was a prisoner at Ravensbruck, and was “rescued at death’s door by the advancing Americans”. His father was a Hungarian government official. The first clue that young George had of trouble: “I had been given my first watch. There was firing outside. I felt a blow on my wrist and looked down to find a neat hole in the centre of my watch. A few days after that we left to move to a friend’s flat further out of town. The journey there was dangerous; tanks, corpses, disfigured bodies. I remember nothing of it now and can only report what my parents told of the scenes of horror we passed on the way. In any case I woke up every night for seven days after that, crying aloud.”
His family left Budapest on a crowded train, spent the night in a hotel, caught another train to Sopron, the nearest major city to Austria. They got off a couple of stops before, and a group of about 20 of them were guided over hills that were “sparsely mined”, by a “mildly intoxicated elderly man” in the middle of the night.
They spent a few days in Austria before they were offered a flight to England. “We landed late at night, on December 2, at Heathrow. A woman from the WVS was offering blankets and cups of weak tea. There followed a ride to a disused army camp where we were to spend the next few days … All in all we were well looked after and my first English was picked up from children’s books in the camp.”
He grew up in England in the late 1960s, “good times for being young. England, having recovered from post-war austerity, was going through a period of spectacular expansion and confidence, a confidence underpinned by irony and self-awareness. In music, in art, in fashion, England appeared to us to lead the world.” Szirtes went on to talk about his poetic development: “I was in a very ambiguous position. My father and his friends regarded me as practically English, though my English friends persevered in thinking of me as Hungarian. Reviewers of my books rarely noticed that I was not English, and I was pleased about that.”