George Szirtes reads his award-winning memoir about his mother, Magda. Her turbulent life reflects the drama of the 20th century.

She survived incarceration in two different concentration camps during the Second World War and then settled in Hungary - but fled with her family in 1956. Arriving as a refugee in London, serious illness forced her to abandon professional work and to live at home as a housewife, where she began the process of “Englishing” her family.

The Photographer at Sixteen reveals a life told backwards, from the depths of Magda’s final days to her girlhood as an ambitious photographer in Budapest. The woman who emerges is beautiful, energetic, direct, warm and passionate. It is a book born of curiosity, of guilt, and of love.

In this final episode, George Szirtes goes back to his mother’s early years as a photographer in Budapest, at the beginning of the great age of magazine photography. He reconstructs the moment when she is seized by the militia, and taken away to concentration camps during the War, as a Jew.

“What I would like to present to somebody is the voice and energy, not of someoe sick and dying but of a woman in her prime…”

George Szirtes is a poet and translator who escaped to Britain with his family after the 1956 Hungarian uprising. He’s the author of some 25 books of poetry. The Photographer at Sixteen won the 2020 James Tait Black Prize for Biography.

Read by the author, George Szirtes
Abridged and produced by Elizabeth Burke
A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 4 Show less