He was born Budapest, and came to England as a refugee in 1956 aged 8. He was brought up in London and studied Fine Art in London and Leeds.

His poems began appearing in national magazines in 1973 and his first book, The Slant Door, was published in 1979. It won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize the following year.

He has won a variety of prizes for his work, most recently the 2004 T. S. Eliot Prize, for his collection Reel and the Bess Hokin Prize for poems in Poetry magazine, 2008. His translations from Hungarian poetry, fiction and drama have also won numerous awards.

Szirtes lives in Wymondham, Norfolk, and teaches at the University of East Anglia. He is married to the artist Clarissa Upchurch, with whom he ran The Starwheel Press and who has been responsible for most of his book jacket images. Her interest in the city of Budapest has led to over twenty years of exploration of the city, its streets, buildings and courtyards in paintings and drawings.

Poetry

• Poetry Introduction 4 with Craig Raine, Alan Hollinghurst, Alistair Elliott, Anne Cluysenaar and Cal Clothier (Faber, 1978)
• The Slant Door (Secker & Warburg, 1979)
• November and May (Secker & Warburg, 1981)
• Short Wave (Secker & Warburg, 1984)
• The Photographer in Winter (Secker & Warburg, 1986)
• Metro (OUP, 1988)
• Bridge Passages (OUP, 1991)
• Blind Field (OUP September 1994)
• Selected Poems (OUP, 1996)
• The Red All Over Riddle Book (Faber, for children, 1997)
• Portrait of my Father in an English Landscape (OUP, 1998)
• The Budapest File (Bloodaxe, 2000)
• An English Apocalypse (Bloodaxe, 2001)
• A Modern Bestiary with artist Ana Maria Pacheco (Pratt Contemporary Art 2004)
• Reel (Bloodaxe, 2004)
• New and Collected Poems (Bloodaxe, 2008)
• Shuck, Hick, Tiffey - Three libretti for children, with Ken Crandell (Gatehouse, 2008)
• The Burning of the Books (Circle Press, 2008)
• The Burning of the Books and Other Poems (Bloodaxe, 2009)

Recordings

• The Poetry Quartets 6, with Moniza Alvi, Michael Donaghy and Anne Stevenson (Bloodaxe / British Council 2001)
• George Szirtes (Poetry Archive, 2006)

Prizes and Honours

• 1980 Faber Memorial Prize for The Slant Door
• 1982 Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature
• 1984 Arts Council Travelling Scholarship,
• 1986 Cholmondeley Prize
• 1990 Déry Prize for Translation The Tragedy of Man
• 1991 Gold Star of the Hungarian Republic
• 1992 Short listed for Whitbread Poetry Prize for Bridge Passages
• 1995 European Poetry Translation Prize for New Life
• 1996 Shortlisted for Aristeion Translation Prize New Life
• 1999 Sony Bronze Award, 1999 - for contribution to BBC Radio Three, Danube programmes
• 1999 Shortlisted for Weidenfeld Prize for The Adventures of Sindbad
• 2000 Shortlisted for Forward Prize Single Poem: Norfolk Fields
• 2002 George Cushing Prize for Anglo-Hungarian Cultural Relations
• 2002 Society of Authors Travelling Scholarship
• 2003 Leverhulme Research Fellowship
• 2004 Pro Cultura Hungarica medal
• 2005 T. S. Eliot Prize, for Reel
• 2005 Shortlisted for Weidenfeld Prize for the Night of Akhenaton
• 2005 Shortlisted for Popescu Translation Prize for The Night of Akhenaton
• 2007 Laureate Prize, Days and Nights of Poetry Festival, Romania
• 2008 Bess Hokin Prize (USA) Poetry Foundation

Translation

• Imre Madách: The Tragedy of Man, verse play (Corvina / Puski 1989)
• Sándor Csoóri: Barbarian Prayer. Selected Poems. (part translator, Corvina 1989)
• István Vas: Through the Smoke. Selected Poems. (editor and part translator, Corvina, 1989)
• Dezsö Kosztolányi: Anna Édes. Novel. (Quartet, 1991)
• Ottó Orbán: The Blood of the Walsungs. Selected Poems. (editor and majority translator, Bloodaxe, 1993)
• Zsuzsa Rakovszky: New Life. Selected Poems. (editor and translator, OUP March, 1994)
• The Colonnade of Teeth: Twentieth Century Hungarian Poetry (anthology, co-editor and translator, Bloodaxe 1996)
• The Lost Rider: Hungarian Poetry 16-20th Century, an anthology, editor and chief translator (Corvina, 1998)
• Gyula Krúdy: The Adventures of Sindbad short stories (CEUP, 1999)
• László Krasznahorkai: The Melancholy of Resistance (Quartet, 1999)
• The Night of Akhenaton: Selected Poems of Ágnes Nemes Nagy (editor-translator, Bloodaxe 2003)
• Sándor Márai: Conversation in Bolzano (Knopf / Random House, 2004)
• László Krasznahorkai: War and War (New Directions, 2005)
• Sándor Márai: The Rebels (Knopf / Random House 2007; Vintage / Picador, 2008)
• Ferenc Karinthy: Metropole (Telegram, 2008
• Sándor Márai: Esther's Inheritance (Knopf / Random House, 2008)

As editor

• The Collected Poems of Freda Downie (editor, Bloodaxe 1995)
• New Writing 10, Anthology of new writing co-edited with Penelope Lively (Picador 2001)
• An Island of Sound: Hungarian fiction and poetry at the point of change (co-editor) Harvill 2004