George Szirtes was born in Budapest in 1948 and came to England as a refugee with his parents and younger brother following the Hungarian Uprising of 1956. He grew up in London and trained as a painter in Leeds and London. He is the author of some fifteen books of poetry, roughly the same of translation from Hungarian, and a few miscellaneous other books. His first, The Slant Door was joint winner of the Faber Memorial Prize. He won the T. S. Eliot Prize for Reel, and was shortlisted for the prize for The Burning of the Books and for Bad Machine. His other prizes include the Cholmondeley Award, and the Bess Hokin Prize in the USA. Bloodaxe Books published his New and Collected Poems in 2008. It was listed in The Independent as one of the Books of the Year. His translations from Hungarian have won international prizes, including the Best Translated Book Award in the USA for László Krasznahorkai’s Satantango and his latest book for children, In the Land of the Giants won the CLPE Prize for best collection of poetry for children. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in the U.K. and of the Szécheny Academy of Arts and Letters in Hungary. He is married to painter Clarissa Upchurch and recently retired from teaching at the University of East Anglia.