Critically acclaimed writer John Burnside was born in Dunfermline, Scotland, and raised in nearby Cowdenbeath and in Corby, Northamptonshire. His father was an alcoholic and the cause of a fraught, violent home life for Burnside, which he explored in his later memoirs. He studied English and European languages at Cambridgeshire College of Arts and Technology and worked as a systems analyst and software engineer for many years, only beginning to publish poetry in the 1980s. In 1996, he moved back to Fife after three decades away from Scotland and became a freelance writer. That same year, he married Sarah Dunsby, with whom he would have two sons.
The prolific Burnside was the author of 17 poetry collections, ten fiction books, three memoirs, and one essay collection. His poetry career began with The Hoop (1988) and Common Knowledge (1991), both of which won the Scottish Arts Council Book Award. Later collections include Feast Days (1992), winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize; The Asylum Dance (2000), which won the Whitbread Poetry Award and was a Forward Prize for Poetry and T. S. Eliot Prize shortlisted work; and Black Cat Bone (2011), one of only four winners of both the Forward Prize for Poetry and the T. S. Eliot Prize. His poetry, described by Jesse Nathan as being crafted with “a stunning, smooth, perfected lyricism,” spans the ecological and the personal, the everyday and the metaphysical, drawing deep connections with musical resonance.
Of Burnside’s novels, The Devil’s Footprints (2007) was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and A Summer of Drowning (2011) was shortlisted for the Costa Book Award. His three renowned memoirs—A Lie About My Father (2006), Waking Up in Toytown (2010), and I Put a Spell on You (2014)—revisit his tumultuous Catholic childhood and the legacy of drug abuse and mental illness left by his father. He authored a history of twentieth-century poetry, The Music of Time (2019), and wrote regularly for publications including the Guardian, New Statesman, the TLS, the London Review of Books, and the New Yorker.
Burnside was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the recipient of the Cholmondeley Award and the David Cohen Prize for lifetime achievement in literature, among many other honors. A former writer-in-residence at Dundee University, he taught at the University of St. Andrews for three decades, mentoring nearly two generations of young Scottish writers. Burnside died in May 2024.
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More John Burnside
Text/Audio: Read poems by Burnside and listen to podcast episodes at the Scottish Poetry Library
Video: Watch Burnside speak at the 2022 Alpine Fellowship Symposium
Text/Audio: Read and listen to poems by Burnside at the Poetry Archive