
English Podcast Start at 00:00:00
Bengali Podcast Start at 00:22:29
Hindi Podcast Start at 00:40:35
Hungarian Podcast Start at 00:58:21
Reference
The Photographer at Sixteen : Szirtes, George: Amazon.in: Books. (2019). Amazon.in. https://www.amazon.in/PHOTOGRAPHER-AT-SIXTEEN-RADIO-BOOK/dp/085705855X
Morrison, B. (2019, March 16). The Photographer at Sixteen by George Szirtes review – a brilliant, scrupulous portrait. The Guardian; The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/mar/16/the-photographer-at-sixteen-by-george-szirtes-review
Seymour, M. (2019, January 25). The Photographer at Sixteen by George Szirtes — snapshots of a captive subject. @FinancialTimes; Financial Times. https://www.ft.com/content/a04fda7e-0f7b-11e9-b2f2-f4c566a4fc5f
Szőke, D. (2020). Szirtes, George. 2019. The Photographer at Sixteen-The Death and Life of a Fighter. Quercus, London: Maclehose Press. 205 pp. Hungarian Cultural Studies, 13, 257-259. https://doi.org/10.5195/ahea.2020.412
Huen, A. (2019). Photographs, Photography and the Photographer: A conversation with George Szirtes. Wasafiri, 34(3), 59–63. https://doi.org/10.1080/02690055.2019.1613016
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🎙️✨ Welcome, listeners, to “Revise and Resubmit” — and this weekend, we’re diving into another spellbinding episode of “Weekend Classics”!
📚 Today’s feature takes us through light, loss, and the language of survival — a memoir that rewinds time to reveal the woman behind the lens. It’s called “The Photographer at Sixteen: The Death and the Life of a Fighter”, written by the extraordinary poet and translator George Szirtes — published by MacLehose Press back in 2019.
🕰️ It begins with an ending — a mother’s final breath in an ambulance in 1975 — and then, in prose as delicate as a photograph fading in reverse, it travels back through memory, exile, and war. This is not just a book about death. It’s about how life insists on remembering, even when memory hurts.
🎞️ George Szirtes — Hungarian-born, refugee, poet, translator of the 2025 Nobel Laureate László Krasznahorkai, and winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize — picks up the fragments of his mother’s life and turns them into a quiet symphony of survival. His words remind us that even silence can have texture, and even tragedy can have tenderness.
So, grab your coffee, pause your weekend scroll, and think with me — when we look at an old photograph, are we seeing memory… or are we seeing ourselves? 🤔📸
💫 Huge thanks to George Szirtes for this hauntingly beautiful work and for teaching us that reversing a story can sometimes bring it closer to the truth.
🎧 Don’t forget to subscribe to “Revise and Resubmit” on Spotify, follow our visual deep dives on YouTube at “Weekend Researcher”, and tune in anywhere you love your stories — we’re also on Amazon Prime and Apple Podcast.
Stay curious, stay reflective — and until next time, keep revising the way you see the world. 🌍💬