Magda’s Boy: How George Szirtes invented his mother

For much of his career, award-winning poet George Szirtes has been trying different ways of putting his family's extraordinary experiences into words.
Szirtes's mother, Magda, was a Hungarian photographer who survived two concentration camps before building a life wife his father, Laszlo, in postwar Budapest. Laszlo managed to escape the labour camps of Ukraine and went on to occupy a senior position in the Ministry of Building under the new communist regime. After Russian tanks rolled into the city in 1956, they escaped with their two young sons to England.
Szirtes has explored these events numerous times in verse, but has recently done so for the first time in prose, in a memoir about his mother, The Photographer at Sixteen. Filmmaker Anthony Wilks spent some time with Szirtes to find out how he's gone about writing this story, and discover what it's like to be a Hungarian-born poet living in England and writing in English.
Film by Anthony Wilks
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