On behalf of the Poetry Medal Committee 2024, the British 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.”

Asked what the prize means to him, Szirtes says, somewhat quizzically, “It’s a mystery, but it’s a very nice mystery. I know it’s slightly different from being given a prize for a book, but I think it’s more than that. I don’t know how else to explain it.”

Szirtes began writing poetry at school in London. Between 1968 and 1974, he studied fine art in Leeds and London. He married fellow artist Clarissa Upchurch in 1970, and the couple have two children. Between 1992 and 2013, Szirtes taught creative writing at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England.

He has received various prizes for his poetry. “The Slant Door” (1979), Szirtes’ first book of poems, was joint winner of the Faber Prize. He won the T S Eliot Prize in 2004 for “Reel.” “Mapping the Delta” (Bloodaxe 2013) was a Poetry Book Society Choice. “Fresh Out of the Sky” (2021) is his most recent publication.

In his “Reading George Szirtes” (Bloodaxe 2008), John Sears wrote that Szirtes’ poetry is “influenced by English and Irish modernism and formalism and also, increasingly, by literary traditions made available by Szirtes’ own extensive translating of Hungarian poetry into English. Szirtes’ poetry is deeply concerned with exploring family encounters with history as offering provisional and incomplete coordinates for locating the self and its memories within wider historical contexts.”

I spoke to Szirtes at the start of this year. As you might expect from someone who has spent most of his life writing poetry, translating and teaching creative writing, the writer speaks in melodic paragraphs and weighs his words carefully. He retains a slight accent.

First Visit Back

Szirtes wrote three books before going to Hungary in 1984, the first time he’d been back since 1956. After this visit, he began to be described as a “Hungarian-born English poet, sometimes even a Hungarian poet, despite never having written a word in Hungarian,” he says.

After his long poem “Metro,” a meditation on identity, history and Budapest, was published in 1988, he says he became known as a “Jewish, Hungarian-born English poet.” The first time Szirtes went back to Budapest it changed his life, he tells me.

“It was partly the experience of hearing Hungarian everywhere around me. In that sense, it was a landscape. In England, I didn’t live in any kind of Hungarian circumstances. We didn’t speak Hungarian at home. I hadn’t spoken the language for 28 years.”

Szirtes also experienced a “hard to describe sense of recognizing, not specific streets and buildings but where I was: in Pest. Especially then, in 1984, when the buildings were still very much scarred by the war and the revolution, and they were often in disrepair. I thought I’d hit a part of myself that had been dormant, and it changed my life.”

After this momentous visit, Szirtes began to write about the city (he’d never done so before) and to translate. Today, Szirtes says he identifies as a “Budapesti” rather than a Hungarian.

Spiritual Home

“There’s a courtyard in Pest, in Magyar utca, Number 10, known as the Unger-ház, built in 1852 by Miklós Ybl. I was taken there in the 1980s, and I thought, ‘This is it, my spiritual home.’ I’ve said, and I don’t know if it’s actually possible, that if I’m dying, take me there, and that’s where I will die,” he says.

“The courtyard is in a Romantic style. It moved me then, and it moves me every time I return. Whenever I go to Budapest, I visit it. It gives me a notion of belonging.”

Szirtes returns to Hungary every year. He’ll be here in April, invited by the University of Pécs. He’ll spend 10 days in Budapest with his wife, a visual artist whose chief subject for many years was Budapest. “The urban landscape has ingrained itself in her as it has in me,” Szirtes says.

They’ll meet with old friends. Szirtes, now 76, is in touch with younger poets, although, he chuckles, “I was sitting at a café with six or seven of them last April, and when I called them ‘the younger generation,’ they laughed because they’re all in their 40s heading toward 50.”

He’s translated many of these poets and thinks they’re very good. This February, his translations of poet and novelist Krisztina Tóth, one of Hungary’s most popular and best-known writers, will be published.

For the most part, Szirtes and his wife will stick to Pest, where he was born and spent the first eight years of his life. “Pest is heart territory. Buda is liver territory,” he says. “I don’t know it so well. It’s out there somewhere, part of the organism.”

Szirtes will visit his favorite restaurant, M., at 48 Kertész utca, practically opposite the house where he grew up. Appropriately enough, M is associated with Hungarian poets, particularly György Petri. At some point, he’ll have chicken paprika, and he says, “I’ll revisit my courtyard.”

George Szirtes’ “New and Collected Poems” includes the long poem “Metro” set in Budapest’s “Empire underground” and dealing with Szirtes’ need “To find a history which feels like truth” and make this part of his own story. It’s well worth reading.

This article was first published in the Budapest Business Journal print issue of February 7, 2025.