George Szirtes was born in Budapest in 1948, and came to England with his family after the 1956 Hungarian Uprising. He was educated in England, training as a painter, and has always written in English. In recent years he has worked as a translator of Hungarian literature, producing editions of such writers as Otto Orban, Zsuzsa Rakovszky and Agnes Nemes Nagy. He co-edited Bloodaxe's Hungarian anthology The Colonnade of Teeth. His Bloodaxe poetry books are The Budapest File (2000); An English Apocalypse (2001); Reel (2004), winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize; New & Collected Poems (2008) and The Burning of the Books and other poems (2009), shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2009. Bloodaxe has also published John Sears' critical study Reading George Szirtes (2008). Szirtes lives in Norfolk and teaches at the University of East Anglia. Born in Budapest, child refugee in 1956, George Szirtes is a poet & translator, author of over a dozen books of poetry including Selected and Collected Poems. Winner of Faber Prize and Eliot Prize among others, as well of prizes for translation of poetry and fiction out of Hungarian.also worked as artist, critic, teacher, editor, small press printer & publisher. Also blogger at georgeszirtes.blogspot.com
Helen Ivory is a visually precise poet, with the gift of creating
stunning images with an economy of means.
*James Sutherland-Smith*
Helen Ivory creates a troubled yet beguiling world rich in irony
and disquiet. She possesses a strongly-grounded narrative voice
which, combined with her dextrous transformative takes both on
reality and on what lies beyond reality’s surface, puts one in mind
of the darker side of Stevie Smith who said that poetry “is a
strong explosion in the sky”.
*Penelope Shuttle*
[of George Szirtes] I can't think of anyone but Louis MacNeice
whose work has struck me as having such a combination of sheer
verbal energy, contemporary pertinence and acuity, formal
legerdemain, imaginative elan and fertile, courageous
strangeness.
*Marilyn Hacker*
There are none of the adept terza rima or sonnets we might expect
from Szirtes here. Instead "a series of narrative cries and
thrusts" create a feeling of chaos. Yet his use of language to
interrogate language remains as uncomfortably elegant as a Leni
Riefenstahl film.
*Poetry Review*
This engaging collection of poems and verses is best fitted for the
younger end of the 8 to 12 age-group. The bset of them take a
quirky, sidelong, witty look at the world, expanding on a child’s
observation, for example the noise a fridge makes as it digests our
offerings ... the whole collection is full off infectious delight
in language.
*The School Librarian*
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