John Burnside FRSL FRSE (19 March 1955 – 29 May 2024) was a Scottish writer. He was one of four poets (with Ted Hughes, Sean O'Brien and Jason Allen-Paisant) to have won the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize for one book. In Burnside's case it was for his 2011 collection, Black Cat Bone. In 2023, he won the David Cohen Prize.

Life and works

Burnside was born in Dunfermline, Scotland, and raised in Cowdenbeath and Corby. He studied English and European Thought and Literature at Cambridge College of Arts and Technology. A former computer software engineer, he was a freelance writer after 1996. He was a former Writer in Residence at the University of Dundee and was Professor in Creative Writing at the University of St Andrews, where he taught creative writing, literature and ecology and American poetry. His first collection of poetry, The Hoop, was published in 1988 and won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award. Other poetry collections by Burnside include Common Knowledge (1991), Feast Days (1992), winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and The Asylum Dance (2000), winner of the Whitbread Poetry Award and shortlisted for both the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) and the T. S. Eliot Prize. The Light Trap (2001) was also shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. Burnside was also the author of two collections of short stories, Burning Elvis (2000), and Something Like Happy (2013), as well as several novels, including The Dumb House (1997), The Devil's Footprints, (2007), Glister, (2009) and A Summer of Drowning, (2011). His multi-award winning memoir, A Lie About My Father, was published in 2006 and its successor, Waking Up In Toytown, in 2010. A Lie About My Father earned him the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year in 2006, alongside the Sundial Scottish Arts Council Non-fiction Book of the Year and the CORINE International Literature Prize. In 2008 he won the Cholmondeley Award. A further memoir, I Put A Spell On You, combined personal history with reflections on romantic love, magic and popular music. His short stories and feature essays have appeared in numerous magazines and journals, including The New Yorker, The Guardian and The London Review of Books, among others. He also wrote an occasional nature column for the New Statesman. In 2011 he received the Petrarca-Preis, a major German international literary prize. Burnside's work was inspired by his engagement with nature, environment and deep ecology. His collection of short stories, Something Like Happy, was published in 2013. Burnside was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (elected in 1999) and in March 2016 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland's National Academy for science and letters. He also lectured annually and oversaw the judging of the writing prize at the Alpine Fellowship. Burnside died after a short illness on 29 May 2024, at the age of 69.

Awards

Poetry collections

Fiction

Non-fiction

Screen

Critical studies