John Burnside
John Burnside (19 March 1955 -) is a Scottish writer, born in Dunfermline.
Burnside studied English and European Languages at Cambridge College of Arts and Technology. A former computer software engineer, he has been a freelance writer since 1996. He is a former Writer in Residence at the University of Dundee and is now Reader in Creative Writing at St Andrews University. His first collection of poetry, The Hoop, was published in 1988 and won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award. Other poetry collections 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.
John Burnside is also the author of a collection of short stories, Burning Elvis (2000), and several novels, including The Dumb House (1997), The Mercy Boys (1999) (winner of the Encore Award) and The Locust Room (2001), which is set in Cambridge in 1975, and explores the consequences of a series of violent rapes. His poetry collection, The Good Neighbour (2005), was shortlisted for the 2005 Forward Poetry Prize (Best Collection). He also occasionally writes a column for The Guardian newspaper.
Burnside was one of the judges for the 2007 Griffin Poetry Prize.
Literary Works
Poetry
- The Broon Hoop (Carcanet, 1988)
- Common Knowledge (Secker and Warburg, London, 1991)
- Feast Days (Secker and Warburg, London, 1992)
- The Myth of the Twin (Jonathan Cape, London, 1995)
- Swimming in the Flood (Jonathan Cape, London, 1995)
- Penguin Modern Poets (Penguin, 1996)
- A Normal Skin (Jonathan Cape, London, 1997)
- The Asylum Dance (Jonathan Cape, London, 2000)
- The Light Trap (Jonathan Cape, London, 2002)
- The Good Neighbour (Jonathan Cape, 2005)
- Selected Poems (2006)
Fiction
- The Dumb House (Jonathan Cape, London, 1997)
- The Mercy Boys (Jonathan Cape, London, 1999)
- Burning Elvis (Jonathan Cape, London, 2000)
- The Locust Room (Jonathan Cape, London, 2001)
- Living Nowhere (Jonathan Cape, London, 2003)
- The Devil's Footprints (Jonathan Cape, 2007)
- Glister (Jonathan Cape, 2008)
Non-Fiction
- A Lie About My Father (2006)
Screen
- Dice (with A. L. Kennedy), a series for television, produced by Cité-Amérique, Canada
Other
- Wild Reckoning (Gulbenkian, 2004), joint editor with Maurice Riordan of this anthology of ecology-related poems