“The Trace They Wished to Leave”

Wednesday  21 April    7.30 pm   

Tickets at door £5/£3 conc.

George Szirtes   will present “poems of foreignness and belonging” from his own work and that of other Hungarian poets.George Szirtes was born in Budapest, in 1948. His family came to England as refugees in following the revolution of 1956. He studied sciences at school, went to art college for five years, practiced as a painter, and has been publishing books since 1979. He has written some fourteen books of poetry that have won the Faber Memorial Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Cholmondeley Award  and been short-listed for others. His many translations from Hungarian poetry and fiction have won various international prizes. He has edited anthologies of English language writing as well as of Hungarian literature in translation and reviewed books in various national newspapers.

    Of his New and Collected Poems (2008), The Independent said, "this grand gathering of his poems shows – in more than 500 beguiling pages – just how tall he stands and how far he sees." and his latest book, The Burning of the Books and Other Poems (2009) was praised as the work of 'a European visionary and multi-disciplinary sensibility straddling time and dimension restrictions'.

    He has worked with artists, composer and musicians over many years, writing several libretti, books for musicals, texts for oratorios, and straight plays. After years of teaching in schools and art colleges, he is currently teaching at the University of East Anglia. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1982.

         Poetry in Translation is a series organised by Sebastian Hayes, co-Director of Brimstone Press Ltd.

www.poetryintranslation.org

THE POETRY CAFE – BETTERTON STREET, LONDON WC2

POETRY  IN  TRANSLATION

“The Trace They Wished to Leave”

 Wednesday  28th April at 7.30 pm   

Tickets at door £5/£3 conc.

George Gömöri will read some of his own poems and translations of other Hungarian poets.

 George (György) Gömöri is a Hungarian poet, translator and scholar living in London. He left Hungary after the revolution in 1956 in which he was a student organiser and editor of the journal University Youth.  He co-translates with the poets Clive Wilmer and Richard Berengarten into English.  Polishing October,  published in 2008 by Shoestring Press, Nottingham, is the second  collection  of his poetry in English. His other collaborations with Clive Wilmer include the translated verse of  Miklós Radnóti (1979, 2003) and György Petri (1991,1999) . He also edited an anthology of modern Hungarian poetry The Colonnade of Teeth (1996) with George Szirtes. A Retired Lecturer from the University of Cambridge, he is Emeritus Fellow of Darwin College, Cambridge. His literary prizes include the Salvatore Quasimodo Prize (Balatonfüred, 1993), the Ada Negri Prize ( Lodi, 1995), the Alföld Prize (2009) and the Pro Cultura Hungarica (1999). Member of the Editorial Board of the American magazine World Literature Today and Foreign Member of PAU, the Cracow-based Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences.

         Poetry in Translation is a series organised by Sebastian Hayes, co-Director of Brimstone Press Ltd.

www.poetryintranslation.org