12201161053?profile=originalGeorge 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 photography 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.

With thanks to Colin Ford CBE for highlighting this broadcast

The Photographer at Sixteen - George Szirtes
BBC Radio 4 from 15 March and then for four further episodes daily and on BBC Sounds 
See: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000t418/episodes/guide

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