George Sziertes was born in Budapest in 1948 and came to England with his family after the 1956 Hungarian uprising. He was educated in England, trained as a painter, and has always written in English.

In recent years, he worked as a translator of Hungarian literature, producing editions of such writers as Agnes Nemes Nagy, Otto Orban and Zsuzsa Rakovszky, and novelists like Dezso Kosztolányi, Gyula Krúgy, László Krasznahorkai and Sándor Márai.

He has won various prizes and awards for his translations, including the European Poetry Translation Prize, the Dery Prize and the Gold Star of the Hungarian Republic.

He also co-edited Bloodaxe's Hungarian anthology The Colonade of Teeth. After four collections with Secker: The Slant Door (1979), November and May (1981), Short Wave (1984), The Photographer in Winter (1986) , and five with OUP: Metro (1988), Bridge Passages (1991), Blind Field (1994) and Selected Poems 1976-96 (1996), he published his Hungarian retrospective The Budapest File with Bloodaxe in 2000 and his poems on life in England, An English Apocalypse in 2001.

His poems have won the Faber Prize, the Cholmondeley Award and been shortlisted for the Forward and Whitbread Prizes.

He edited the New Writing anthology with Penelope Lively in 2001 and An Island of Sound: Hungarian Poetry and Fiction at the Point of Change, which is due to appear in May 2004.

He has also worked on several plays and collaborations with composers, has written on visual and is a frequent reviewer and broadcaster.

George Szirtes is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, lives in Norfolk and teaches at Norwich School of Art and Design and the University of East Anglia.

Read George Szirtes notes on the Walberberg Seminar.

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