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George Szirtes wins King's Gold Medal for Poetry 2024
George Szirtes has been awarded the King’s Gold Medal for Poetry for 2024, Buckingham Palace announced on 16th December. The award was instituted by King George V in 1933 at the suggestion of the then Poet Laureate John Masefield. The award is made for excellence in poetry and will be presented at a later date.
The Poetry Medal Committee recommended Szirtes as the recipient of the medal for 2024 on the basis of his "deeply personal pieces of work, informed by his dual perspective, looking both east and west".
Szirtes was born in Budapest in 1948, before coming to England with his family as refugees after the Hungarian Uprising in 1956. He has published poetry, translations and biographies, including his 2024 poetry collection Reel, which won the TS Eliot Prize 2004, and The Photographer at Sixteen (2019), a memoir of his mother, which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography.
He has published 13 full-length collections of poetry, with his poetry for adults being published by Bloodaxe Books since 2000. The themes of his work are topical, contemporary and respond to current affairs across the world. His sequence In the Streets of a Small Town, included in Fresh Out of the Sky (Bloodaxe Books, 2021), focuses on the pandemic. The title sequence of that collection also revisits his arrival in England as an eight-year-old child in 1956 following his escape from Hungary.
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Szirtes said: "I could not believe it when Simon Armitage shared the news. When our family came here as refugees in 1956 only my father spoke some English, although English was chronologically my second language it quickly became first in daily life. I had no notion of being a poet until one day in a school corridor, a friend showed me a poem and suddenly a door opened where there hadn’t been a door at all. I had no expectations, no background or formal teaching, so being the recipient of the King’s Gold Medal for Poetry tops everything. I am deeply grateful to those who have chosen to award me in this way, it is wonderful to join my name with all those excellent poets honoured in the past and to become, in time, part of that past myself."
The 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. His work and his perspectives are as relevant now as they were when he first put pen to paper, and possibly more so."
