Born in Hungary in 1948, a child refugee of the 1956 Uprising, George Szirtes published his first book of poems, The Slant Door, in 1979. It won the Faber Prize. He has published many since then, winning, among others, the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2004 for which he has been twice shortlisted since. He has also won various international prizes for his translations of Hungarian literature including the Man Booker International award for translators for translations of László Krasznahorkai. In 2018 he was shortlisted for the Man Booker International award for his translation of Krasznahorkai's The World Goes On.
His memoir about his mother's life, THE PHOTOGRAPHER AT SIXTEEN: THE DEATH AND LIFE OF A FIGHTER, was published by Maclehose Press in January 2019. It was shortlisted for the 2019 Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize, the 2020 Wingate Literary Prize, and won the Biography & Memoir category at the East Anglian Book Awards and the 2020 James Tait Black Prize in biography.