First Thursday present George Szirtes plus music from Orange Zebra

George Szirteswas 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 poets such as Ott Orbn, Zsuzsa Rakovszky, gnes Nemes Nagy and Krisztina Tth, and novelists including the 2025 Nobel Laureate Lszl Krasznahorkai. His translation of Hungarian poet Krisztina Tth's retrospective My Secret Life: Selected Poems, published by Bloodaxe in February 2025, was shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2025.He co-edited Bloodaxes Hungarian anthology The Colonnade of Teeth. His Bloodaxe poetry books include: The Budapest File (2000); An English Apocalypse (2001); Reel (2004), winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize 2004; New & Collected Poems (2008) and The Burning of the Books and other poems (2009), shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2009. Bad Machine (2013) was a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2013. Mapping the Delta (2016), another Poetry Book Society Choice, was followed by Fresh Out of the Sky (2021). In December 2024 George Szirtes was awarded The King's Gold Medal for Poetry, 2024. He was presented with the medal by King Charles III at Buckingham Palace in November 2025.
Bloodaxe has also published his Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures, Fortinbras at the Fishhouses: Responsibility, the Iron Curtain and the sense of history as knowledge (2010), and John Sears critical study, Reading George Szirtes (2008). His memoir of his mother, The Photographer at Sixteen (MacLehose Press, 2019), won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography. Szirtes lives in Norfolk and is a freelance writer, having retired from teaching at the University of East Anglia.George Szirtes was nominated for the inaugural Norwich City of Literature Award in the 2025 East Anglian Book Awards. This new award honours individuals or organisations making an outstanding contribution to the regions literary life. The winner was chosen by public vote, open to residents of Eastern England.Orange Zebra have been a familiar sight at many FIRST THURSDAYS providing their unique interpretations of well know, and sometimes not sso well known songs fro the jazz/blues/folk tradition.