SOURCE: Szirtes, George with András Gerevich. “Hungarian Roots, English Traditions.” Hungarian Quarterly 42, no. 164 (winter 2001): 100-06.

In the following interview, Szirtes and Gerevich discuss Szirtes's life and work.

George Szirtes, born in Budapest in 1948, left Hungary with his family as a child in 1956 and settled in England. So far he has published 13 volumes of poetry, the most recent of which are The Budapest File, Bloodaxe/Corvina, 2000, a collection of his poems on Hungarian topics, and An English Apocalypse, Bloodaxe, 2001. He has received numerous prestigious British awards, including the Faber Prize and the Cholmondeley Award. He returned to Hungary for the first time in 1984 and has come back every year since then. He has translated many literary works into English, amongst others The Tragedy of Man by Imre Madách, selections from the poems of István Vas, Ottó Orbán, Sándor Csóri and Zsuzsa Rakovszky, and...