George Szirtes has been awarded the 2024 King's Gold Medal for Poetry, which was established by King George V in 1933 and is awarded annually for excellence in poetry to a recipient from the U.K. or a Commonwealth Realm. The Poetry Medal Committee recommended Szirtes "due to his deeply personal pieces of work, informed by his dual perspective, looking both east and west."
Born in Budapest in 1948, Szirtes and his family moved to England as refugees following the Hungarian Uprising in 1956. "He is now considered a major figure across the United Kingdom and beyond," the committee noted. Szirtes has published 13 collections of poetry as well as biographies, including The Photographer at Sixteen (2019), a memoir of his mother that won the James Tait Black Prize for biography.
"George Szirtes is a deserving recipient of the King's Gold Medal for Poetry," said Poet Laureate Simon Armitage. "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."
Szirtes commented: "When our family came here as refugees in 1956 only my father spoke some English. Although English was chronologically my second language, it quickly become 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."