JohnBurnside

News

John Burnside, 1955-2024

A Memoir

Waking Up in Toytown

John Burnside was among the most acclaimed writers of his generation. His novels, short stories, poetry and memoirs won numerous awards, including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial, Saltire Scottish Book of the Year and, in 2023, he received the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime’s achievement in literature. In 2011 Black Cat Bone won both the Forward and the T.S. Eliot Prizes for poetry. He died in 2024.

With wit, precision and grace, John Burnside's second memoir traces the aftershocks of a troubled childhood into troubled adulthood. 
 
With a new introduction by Sarah Perry 
 
‘Among the best writers of his generation, fully voiced and perfectly pitched’ Andrew O’Hagan 
 
In the early 80s, after a decade of drug abuse and borderline mental illness, John Burnside resolved to escape his addictive personality and find calm in a ‘Surbiton of the mind.’ But the suburbs are not quite as normal as he had imagined, and he relapses into chaos. 
 
He encounters a homicidal office worker who is obsessed with Alfred Hitchcock and Petula Clark, an old lover, with whom he reprises a troubled, masochistic relationship and, finally, the seemingly flesh-and-blood embodiments of all his private phantoms, as he drifts further into unreality. 
 
The second of John Burnside’s extraordinary trilogy of memoirs, Waking Up in Toytown is the story of one man’s search for sanity – but also the story of love that outgrows its restraints and a scorching enquiry into the soul, from one of our greatest contemporary writers. 
 
‘Burnside’s memoir deserves to become a classic. Has anyone written about the direct experience of mental illness with such scrupulous observation and wit?’ Daily Express

I Put a Spell on You

A marvellously meandering, digressive study of the nature of love… Burnside has a lovely garrulousness that is distinctively his own… Exact and enthralling.

[An] indirect, peculiar, consuming memoir… Full of wonders.

A wise and wryly glum autobiography written in a highly rewarding, pared-back style.

Captivating and unsettling… A work of scalding honesty.

Intoxicating… Remarkable… A long-player that resonates long after the stylus has lifted.

Extraordinary, haunting… One reads this book and gets a very real sense of a writer who has thought through an individualistic and compelling way of looking at the world, one that does indeed cast a mightily powerful spell all of its own.

Astonishing… Not just brilliant, but essential reading.

Beautifully expressed and rich in ideas… Powerfully resonant.

Throughout this wonderful book Burnside shows himself incapable of a dull sentence or a shop-soiled thought.

Enthralling and enchanting, much like the song it is named after.

A “coming of age” memoir unlike any other you will ever read.

The last of John Burnside’s three memoirs, I Put a Spell on You is an enthralling ode to love and wonder in all its forms 
 
With a new introduction by Seán Hewitt 
 
'A master of language' Hilary Mantel 
 
The first time he was played ‘I Put a Spell on You’, John Burnside thought he had never heard a more beautiful song – it was an enchantment, a fascination that would turn to obsession. Implicit in the song were all the ambiguities that intrigued him – love, possession, and danger. 
 
In this exquisite and haunting book, John Burnside evokes his coming of age from the industrial misery of Cowdenbeath and Corby to the new world of Cambridge, and follows his drifting thoughts and memories along the way: from uncanny encounters with ‘lost girls’ to digressions on voodoo, acid, and insomnia, alongside a cast that includes Kafka, Narcissus, Diane Arbus and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. 
 
The last of John Burnside’s three memoirs, I Put a Spell on You is a memoir of romance – of lost love and the love of being lost – darkened by threat, illuminated by glamour. 
 
'Astonishing… Not just brilliant, but essential reading' Independent 
 
'Exact and enthralling' Tessa Hadley

The Empire of Forgetting

It’s our great good fortune…that Burnside’s closing work is also one of his finest… It’s impossible not to love the world more when reading Burnside, and impossible not to be more scared and saddened while doing so. He was the ideal laureate of our age

An elegiac evensong of a book, The Empire of Forgetting is Burnside’s last collection, and is a resonant demonstration of his lasting power

In a few lines [of Burnside], are the qualities that so move me in his prose: the confluence of solitude and communion; the pain and solace of a ravaged but persistent physical landscape. Burnside’s life was dedicated to its ruthless excavation and enshrinement

[In] The Empire of Forgetting…there are meditations on nature, faith…and death to give deep pleasure to poetry readers

The Empire of Forgetting has a power and subtlety as striking as anything in his [Burnside’s] expansive oeuvre

A powerful exploration of life and death, illness and grace, wonder and beauty, in the posthumous collection from one of our greatest contemporary poets 
 
'It’s impossible not to love the world more when reading Burnside' GUARDIAN 
 
'A master of language' HILARY MANTEL 
 
John Burnside’s last collection of new poems gathers around a single theme – mortality – and draws on his faltering health and earlier glances with death, creating a powerfully moving exploration of memory, forgetting and the seven ages. 
 
Here, as always, there is a clear-eyed curiosity; a sense of wonder at the beleaguered natural world and its endless mutability – its hidden beauty, often suddenly disclosed – and a deep faith in its old gods. Burnside was always as much a spirit-guide as a poet, and here, in the Empire of Forgetting, we are never far from a fresh alertness to the world, to epiphany – a sudden, spiritual manifestation. 
 
There is a sense, too, in these last poems, of a man having found a ‘dwelling place’ – a sense of rest and peace and settlement with the world. A state of grace. 
 
'Among the best writers of his generation, fully voiced and perfectly pitched’ ANDREW O'HAGAN 
 
‘A titan of literature' KATHLEEN JAMIE

Ruin, Blossom

For my money, John Burnside is by far the best British poet alive

The joy of Burnside's poems - and part of what makes them moving - is that he never stops registering the ways in which beauty makes life worth living

Burnside wrestles with hugeness in a way that few writers dare to do

Sadly Burnside’s final collection before his death…Ruin, Blossom embraces transition and the fleeting, fading, but ultimately renewing nature of all things. His characteristically astute, finely observed lines find the redeeming light in a challenged natural world

One of the most gifted poets writing today

Burnside has a lovely garrulousness that is distinctively his own

John Burnside is a genius... He is constantly alive to alternative possibilities and versions of himself, as close yet unreachable as his own shadow. His responses to the world are so raw, it's as if he's missing a skin - or perhaps the rest of us have grown hides to make life manageable

A musician and chromaticist, he is a poet whose rapt, floating verse conjures up effects of great beauty in both the ear and imagination

Fiona Sampson, author of In Search of Mary Shelley

John Burnside was one of the finest poets of his generation, and with his death in May, we find poetry much the poorer… Burnside’s sharp, suturing language allows us to know the world as it is: ragged and broken, yet full of impossibly fragile beauty

Poetry of this quality is experienced before it is understood… as one does when reading a Shakespeare comedy or an ode by Keats

A beautiful collection of meditative lyrics

Times Literary Supplement, *Books of the Year*

In typically spare and elegant lines, these precious last poems turn away from religious faith or a mystical higher purpose, but nonetheless find solace and meaning in the natural world: unsentimental, beautiful, precarious, enduring

A remarkable collection exploring ageing, mortality and environmental destruction 
 
**WINNER OF THE DAVID COHEN PRIZE FOR LITERATURE 2023** 
 
'By far the best British poet alive' SPECTATOR 
 
'A master of language' HILARY MANTEL 
 
In this powerful, moving book, John Burnside takes his cue from Schiller, who recognised that, as one thing fades, so another flourishes: everywhere and always, in matters great and small, new life blossoms amongst the ruins. 
 
Here, in poems that explore ageing, mortality, environmental destruction and mental illness, Burnside not only mourns what is lost in passing, but also celebrates the new, and sometimes unexpected, forms that emerge from such losses. An elegy for a dead lover ends with a quiet recognition of everyday beauty – first sun streaming through the trees … a skylark in the near field, flush with song – as the speaker emerges from lockdown after a long illness. 
 
Throughout, the poet attends to the quality of grace – numinous, exquisite, fleeting as an angel’s wing – and the broken tryst between humankind and its spiritual and animal elements, even with itself: the gaunt deer on the roads/like refugees. He acknowledges the inevitability of the fading towards death, but still finds chimes of light in the darkness – insisting that, here and now, even in decline, the world, when given its due attention, is all Annunciation. 
 
*A BOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT*

Learning to Sleep

Lucid, lyrical, and intellectually profound: this collection of poems resonates with life and death, but mostly what falls in between: the charmed darkness. 
 
Several ghosts haunt Learning to Sleep, from the author's mother, commemorated in an exquisitely charged variant on the pastoral elegy, to the poet Arthur Rimbaud, who wanders an implausible Lincolnshire landscape looking for some sign of belonging. Throughout the book, the powers and dominions of a lost pagan ancestry emerge unexpectedly through the gaps in contemporary life: half-seen and fleeting, but profoundly present. Behind it all, the figure of Hypnos, the Greek god of sleep, marks Burnside's own attempts to come to terms with the severe sleep disorder from which he has suffered for years, a condition that culminated in the recent near-death experience that informs the latter part of the book. 
 
Add to this a series of provocative meditations on the ways in which we are all harmed by institutions, from organised religion, or marriage, to the tawdry concepts of gender and romantic love that subtly govern our personal lives, and Learning to Sleep reveals Burnside at his most elegiac, while still retaining a radical pagan's sense of celebration and cultural independence. 
 
‘I read it over and over again, marvelling at its concision and beauty.' Cressida Connolly, Spectator 
 
** A SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR 2021**

The absence of rest, and its physical and mental impacts, is made tangible... Burnside deftly provides some light within this gloaming.

For my money, John Burnside is by far the best British poet alive... I read it over and over again, marvelling at its concision and beauty.

A masterful storyteller... I'm in safe hands whenever I pick up a book by him.

As a poet, Burnside has peripheral vision: he is always glimpsing other worlds out of the corner of his eye... Never stops registering the ways in which beauty makes life worth living.

Observer, on STILL LIFE WITH FEEDING SNAKE

Few writers manage distinction in even one form. John Burnside has achieved it in two [poetry and fiction]... A Burnside narrative stays in the mind like a half-broken dream; it's often hard to pin down just why it is so compelling... If you have hitherto admired John Burnside in only one genre, now is the time to take the smallest of sideways steps and read both.

New Statesman, on ASHLAND & VINE and STILL LIFE WITH FEEDING SNAKE

Ashland & Vine

The Costa prize-winning poet and novelist is back with a remarkable novel about love grief, and the power of unlikely friendships

What does it mean to live with integrity in the United States of America? That is the question haunting John Burnside’s new novel… The way that Burnside layers these stories is masterful, and becomes a meditation on storytelling itself.

A book of wintry landscapes, family secrets and alcoholism, but it's also a paean to the art of listening well that is especially welcome after the last 12 months of stridency…Burnside, who is also an accomplished poet, writes lyrical rose with virtuoso ease…Ashland &amp; Vine is built on the trust that evolves between talker and listener; the movement of a mind trapped in its own uncertainties and a series of tableaux which build to a strange and stirring kind of redemption.

This is a novel that will no doubt be catching the eyes of judges of major prizes in 2017.

Ashland and Vine is a great book… It proceeds with such loping grandeur and is so tight-lipped about its themes that it takes a while for the realization to dawn that it is nothing short of an American epic. That, however, is what Burnside has written: a drifty, dreamy, dramatic epic.

Ashland &amp; Vine proposes solace and joy in intergenerational friendship, and an optimism in what can be accomplished through talking and listening.

Few writers manage distinction in even one form. John Burnside has achieved it in two… [A]s Burnside publishes a novel and a poetry collection on the same day, the doubled nature of his practice is impossible to ignore – and it is to be celebrated… Like his verse, his fiction captures the untidiness of life and provides no neat conclusions; neither points of arrival, nor nicely illustrated morals. Yet, instead of being artless, it creates satisfying, haunting wholes. A Burnside narrative stays in the mind like a half-broken dream; it’s often hard to pin down just why it is so compelling… The book may be a serious examination of social history but its cultural observations are sharp to the point of satire… If you have hitherto admired John Burnside in only one genre, now is the time to take the smallest of sideways steps and read both.

Burnside offers a fictional tale—a story built around a medley of American history, human fallibility and the possibility of hope.

Burnside’s new novel Ashland &amp; Vine is a story about telling old stories again, and never quite settling the truth of a childhood long past… This is a delicate, beautiful novel, filled with tender details and sharply evoked, lyrical moments.

With the very first line, this novel sets up its emotional world with remarkable efficiency. “The day I met Jean Culver was also the day I stopped drinking”… We can sense that the next 300 or so pages are going to bring us revelations, connections and transformation… Although the obvious comparison is with Scheherazade, Burnside’s narrative is more complex than the tale-within-a-tale structure. There is a linear quality to the storytelling, but it is one in which the lines switch, double back and tie themselves in knots, or are cast aside only to be picked up again later.

John is a masterful storyteller, and this is a book all about stories. How they connect us; how they save us. I know I’m in safe hands whenever I pick up a book by him.

There are moments of shocking brutality, but they cannot overwhelm the novel’s curious tenderness. It is far and away Burnside’s most optimistic and gentle book.

‘A master of language.’ Hilary Mantel 
 
Kate, a grieving, semi-alcoholic film student, invites an elderly woman to take part in an oral-history documentary. 
 
Jean declines but makes her a bizarre counteroffer: if Kate can stay sober for four days, she will tell her a story. If she can stay sober beyond that, there will be another, and then another, amounting to the entire history of one family’s life. 
 
Gradually, Jean offers a heart-breaking account, not only of her own history – a lost lover, a family scarred by war – but of the American century itself; as a deep connection emerges between the women which will transform both of their lives in this remarkable novel about love grief, and the power of unlikely friendships. 
 
‘Burnside wrestles with hugeness in a way that few writers dare to … convincingly gracious and profoundly necessary.’ Ali Smith

Still Life with Feeding Snake

The new collection by the prizewinning Scots poet and prose writer

Burnside can describe the material world with astonishing deftness… but here, as so often in his writing, the observable facts undergo a series of transformations: into a meditation on separateness, from this to the end of a relationship, and then on to the nature of our eat-or-be-eaten world… Musical and memorable, this is echt Burnside. He is the poet who more than any other writing today sees the material world and the world of thought and ideas as two sides of the most fragile of membranes. Few could make the colour blue such a sensuous symbol of slippages of atmosphere or mood… Still Life teems with the variety of the world… If you have hitherto admired John Burnside in only one genre, now is the time to take the smallest of sideways steps and read both.

In John Burnside’s latest collection of poetry Still Life with Feeding Snake… nothing stays still for very long and every image wrought onto the page is alight with life and movement… His signature style and themes are present in his latest work Still Life with Feeding Snake, along with a dose of humour… Burnside blends words the way a baker kneads dough – he rolls them up, scrunches them together, stretches a string of them to breaking point then folds them into each other to create something else entirely, all the while never moving from that same meditative spot where a little flour has been sprinkled across the table… A soulful and meditative collection, Still Life with Feeding Snake is already a 2017 literary highlight.

As a poet, Burnside has peripheral vision: he is always glimpsing other worlds out of the corner of his eye… The joy of his poems – and part of what makes them moving – is that he does know and never stops registering the ways in which beauty makes life worth living.

These poems haul you back to the time when you first realized how alone you were (and are), all the time wondering what to become and how. Burnside’s genius is to makes some sense of this pain, for himself and for the reader. This is poetry acting as a scalpel, cutting the heart in order to heal.

The world is such a mess. These poems concentrate on stillness, on time that isn’t haste. They deliver a zen remedy of calm alert.

From our earliest childhood experiences, we learn to see the world as contested space: a battleground between received ideas, entrenched conventions and myriad Authorised Versions on the one hand, and new discoveries, terrible dangers, and everyday miracles on the other. As we grow, that world expands further, to include new species, lost continents, the realm of the dead and the lives of others: cosmonauts swim in distant space, unseen creatures pass through a garden at dusk; we are surrounded by delectable mysteries. 
 
The question of this contested, liminal world sits at the centre of Still Life with Feeding Snake, whose poems live at the edge of loss, or on the cusp of epiphany, always seeking that brief instant of grace when we see what is before us, and not just what we expected to find. In ‘Approaching Sixty’, the poet watches as a woman unclasps her hair: ‘so the nape of her neck/is visible, slender and pale/for moments, before the spill/of light and russet/falls down to her waist’. This, like each poem in the book, becomes an essay in still life and a memento mori, illuminating transient experience with a profound clarity and a charged, sensual beauty.

The Dumb House

John Burnside's first novel, his profoundly disturbing and beautifully written story of scientific curiosity gone awry

A wonderfully disturbing book - chillingly focused and lyrically amoral with moments of remarkable stillness and beauty. A poetic novel in the best and most troubling sense

Burnside's prose is exquisite and he dissects his themes with delicacy to produce a novel resonant with poetic menace

An exceptionally sinister book... It is the story of Luke, whose experiments into the nature of human language are recounted with all the beguiling reasonableness of the highly intelligent madman... The horror is tempered and fine-tuned by the exceptional beauty of Burnside's writing... In Luke, Burnside has produced one of the most chilling voices in recent fiction

As a child, Luke’s mother often tells him the story of the Dumb House, an experiment on newborn babies raised in silence, designed to test the innateness of language. 
 
As Luke grows up, his interest in language and the delicate balance of life and death leads to amateur dissections of small animals – tiny hearts revealed still pumping, as life trickles away. But as an adult, following the death of his mother, Luke’s obsession deepens, resulting in a haunting and bizarre experiment on Luke’s own children. 
 
‘A wonderfully disturbing book - chillingly focused and lyrically amoral with moments of remarkable stillness and beauty.’ A.L. Kennedy 
 
‘Burnside's prose is exquisite, and he dissects his themes with delicacy to produce a novel resonant with poetic menace’ Sunday Times

Living Nowhere

'Living Nowhere amply confirms his reputation as one of our finest prose stylists' - Guardian

The savagery of Burnside's subject matter is finely juxtaposed with the mellifluous and redemptive beauty of his prose. A darkly compelling read

In Living Nowhere, Burnside twins his poetic and storytelling talents as never before to produce a novel full of intrigue, atmosphere and startling imagery... Burnside is fond of the term alchemist; it applies to no one more than himself

John Burnside is a mighty writer... this is writing to stun the sentence, halt the mind...This is the gaze of John Burnside. The burning gaze of a poet: intense, peculiar, off-kilter and deeply interesting... A mighty achievement

Corby, the industrial new town built around a vast steel works, draws many to the fires of its furnaces - in the hope of steady work, a better house, a fresh start. Amongst them are Francis Cameron, from Scotland, and his friend Jan Ruckert, the son of Latvian refugees. Alienated, intelligent and curious, they form a strong and lasting bond: two teenage boys finding their feet in a foreign place. But violence hangs in the Corby air like the ash and the stench from the steel works, and when it comes down it is sudden and lethal - with repercussions that will last a lifetime. 
 
Living Nowhere is a story of friendship and loss - a resonant, thrilling book that carries at its core a beautiful and terrible secret.

The Devil's Footprints

A breathtaking novel by the author of A Lie About My Father.

Burnside does darkness in prose the way Leonardo did enigmatic smiles.. The Devil's Footsteps is convincing, occasionally disturbing and ultimately comforting

A spare, bewitching, beautifully written book... Burnside nimbly delineates the border where the actual and illusory meet: on both sides he finds dark, flinty human truths

The Devil's Footprints is a classic tale with an old-fashioned, gripping plot. But it is also helplessly good at the things that Burnside loves best: geography, the neighbours, the way people's lives go, and the way people's other, secret lives turn out

Both this novel and Gift Songs are superb achievements. To be both a poet and a novelist is highly unusual. To write so outstandingly well in both genres is a rarity indeed

His is a devouring eloquence, unfazed by generic difference and widely admired... what happens on almost every page is absorbing... It can be said of John Burnside's novel what was said by this journal at their outset: that they are the work of an "extraordinarily good writer"

As always, Burnside writes with an almost preternatural acuity. His descriptions are little masterpieces of concision... a chilly, stark and unforgettable fable

Burnside's dark lyricism gives the ordinary surfaces of life a sinister geometry and his startling images cling to the imagination

Part of the charm of [Burnside's] writing comes from its appeal to people's longing, in this atheistical age, for the miraculous, for grace, for forgiveness... Burnside has a new collection of poems, Gift Songs, which echoes St Augustine and T S Eliot. It works well alongside the novel, exploring how a writer puts experience into language, how language paradoxically shapes experience, how a poet must strive to express the seemingly unsayable

Burnside is a writer of great skill and subtlety... As befits a poet of Burnside's considerable reputation, both the inner and outer landscapes are beautifully realised and the novel has the resonant simplicity of the folklore from which it is drawn

[An] engaging and well-written novel, which reads almost as a piece of folklore

Once, on a winter's night many years ago, after a heavy snow, the devil passed through the Scottish fishing town of Coldhaven, leaving a trail of dark hoofprints across the streets and roofs of the sleeping town. 
 
Michael Gardiner has lived in Coldhaven all his life, but still feels like an outsider, a blow-in. When Moira Birnie decides that her abusive husband is the devil and then kills herself and her two young sons, a terrible chain of events begins. Michael's infatuation with Moira's teenage daughter takes him on a journey towards a defined fate, where he is forced to face his present and then, finally, his past...

Glister

The terrifying new novel by the prize-winning Scottish author

A novel that pierces the heart of evil... Consume it at night. Turn out the lights and watch the walls glow

Baffling, haunting, terrifying, moving, and compulsively readable

In the end we are left with the resonance of a book whose centre is nowhere but whose circumference is extraordinarily large

Nobody does eerie quite like John Burnside... exquisite and haunting..... the violence in Glister is shot through with an awful grace...As with all of Burnside's work - poetry, novels and memoir - there is a vision of something inexplicable at the heart of things. I doubt I will read a more unsettling and memorable book this year

Darkly compelling murder mystery., the novel is also a densely layered engagement with questions of politics, spirituality, environmentalism and meta fiction. It is an incredible book; its echoes sound long after the end has been reached

An intersection between horror story, morality tale, feigned memoir and ecological satire

Tackles the question of what lies beyond with wit and subtlety

The atmosphere of Glister is sustained by Burnside's distinctive and widely praised prose style, spare but ruminative, full of ideas and unusual formulations

Burnside burns most brilliantly when he allows himself free rein to become a prophet of the natural sublime... The world of this chilling novel is steeped in a nature so finely drawn that it aches with its pulsing, crippled mortality

Puts him in the class of Hardy and Lawrence

The unrelenting evocation of toxicity is remarkable

a taut, mystical thriller and a thoughtful meditation on humanity

Burnside's story uses suggestion and ambiguity rather than explicit statement, but has the power that comes from leaving plenty of space in which the reader's imagination can go to work

remarkable, genre-defying...Glister is a remarkable book...a fusion of styles and genres, and it succeeds magnificently on those terms...powerfully imagines and beautifully written...A haunting tale, not as depressing as you might expect, and highly recommended

Writing 'this dreamy melange of gritty urbanism with poetic crime puzzler, will appeal to the right reader very highly

Burnside's writing conveys an almost palpable thrill of discovery, a delight in the play of his imagination over this bleak terrain, an irrepressible joy in cultivating metaphor after metaphor and seeing them all, improbably, bloom...The emotion this brilliant and disturbing novel leaves you with is like the spooked feeling Leonard experiences...It takes your breath away, but you don't know if that comes from awe or terror. The Glister" is that kind of story. It's terrifying, and it feels like a gift.

I'm a year late (quite punctual, for me) in recommending John Burnside's austerely poetic novel

The children of Innertown exist in a state of suspended terror. Every year or so, a boy from their school disappears, vanishing into the wasteland of the old chemical plant. Nobody knows where these boys go, or whether they are alive or dead, and without evidence the authorities claim they are simply runaways. 
 
The town policeman, Morrison knows otherwise. He was involved in the cover-up of one boy's murder, and he believes all the boys have been killed. Though he is seriously compromised, he would still like to find out the killer's identity. 
 
The local children also want to know and, in their fear and frustration, they turn on Rivers, a sad fantasist and suspected paedophile living alone at the edge of the wasteland. Trapped and frightened, one of the boys, Leonard, tries to escape, taking refuge in the poisoned ruins of the old plant; there he finds another boy, who might be the missing Liam and might be a figment of his imagination. With his help, Leonard comes to understand the policeman's involvement, and exacts the necessary revenge - before following Liam into the Glister: possibly a disused chemical weapons facility, possibly a passage to the outer world. 
 
A terrifying exploration of loss and the violence that pools under the surface of the everyday, Glister is an exquisitely written, darkly imagined novel by one of our greatest contemporary writers.

Something Like Happy

A collection of masterpieces in short fiction in praise of hope, from prize-winning author John Burnside.

Each story has a splash of intense colour at the heart… These are Scottish versions of the stories of Raymond Carver… Burnside writes tough, home-grown prose that inhabits the story form with perfect fit.

A haunting and beautiful collection that deserves to be read slowly and savoured but which you won’t be able to put down.

Burnside brings a poet’s linguistic precision and emotional acuity… The writer’s deep, bloody engagement with the stuff of life can't fail to leave the reader enlivened, and keen to feel more.

Each [story] is a perfectly pitched, perfectly weighted gem.

Burnside’s sentences flow with a music and logic that is inevitable yet compelling and display the keenest ear for life.

There is much familiar Burnside landscape here – the harsh beauty of dune-grass and headland, the casual and deadly knifing in the pub, the domestic violence… Magical.

For those unacquainted with his sublimely terrifying oeuvre, this is the place to start… Violence simmers under the surface of every story, breaking out in the kind of stark detail that becomes unforgettable.

John Burnside’s career is among the more remarkable in contemporary literature… Even his most routine stories have beauty and intelligence: he is never less than something like brilliant.

Expect elegant prose to counterpoint the gritty themes.

Very sharp, penetrating short stories; some of the best I’ve read for a while.

There is little that the poet, novelist and short story writer Burnside cannot turn his hand to, and this collection simply exemplifies his tremendous talent… Both disturbing and yet perfectly structure, these stories embody something of the modern condition in their glimpses of ordinary people's lives.

All the customary satisfactions of Burnside's writing – anomie, menace, flashes of violence and cruelty, hallucination and snow – but multiplied.

Even Burnside’s most routine stories have beauty and intelligence. He is never less than something like brilliant.

A tremendous collection from a writer working at the full tilt of his gifts.

In these remarkable stories, John Burnside takes us into the lives of men and women trapped in marriage, ensnared by drink, diminished by disappointment. 
 
These are people for whom the idea of ‘home’ has become increasingly intangible, hard to believe – and happiness, or grace, or freedom, all now seem to belong in some kind of dream, or a fable they might have read in a children's picture book. As he says in one story, ‘All a man has is his work and his sense of himself, all the secret life he holds inside that nobody else can know.’ But in each of these normal, damaged lives, we are shown something extraordinary: a dogged belief in some kind of hope or beauty that flies in the face of all reason and is, as a result, both transfiguring and heart-rending. 
 
‘There is no telling what kind of gifts one of John Burnside’s wonderful sentences will contain.’ Anne Enright

All One Breath

The new collection from the author of Black Cat Bone, which won both the Forward and the T.S. Eliot Prize 
 
Shortlisted for the 2014 T.S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize for Best Collection 
 
A New Statesman Book of the Year

There are lines in All One Breath for instance, that brand themselves into your brain with the fire of painful recognition. And yet it is also part of his genius to be ever alert to beauty, too.

One of the most charged collections I have read in a long time. [Burnside's] writing is earthed and ethereal – there is a rare equilibrium to it... Breathtaking.

John Burnside is a genius... He is constantly live to alternative possibilities and versions of himself, as close yet unreachable as his own shadow. His responses to the world are so raw, it's as if he's missing a skin – or perhaps the rest of us have grown hides to make life manageable.

Rare and memorable beauty... For all the melancholy of this collection, Burnside is not a nihilist; the glory of these poems shows us that.

Memory and self-reflection merge into elegy... Burnside is a master of the final clinching line... Across the length of whole poems and the whole book there is great wisdom about how people learn to get along with family and with their own past selves, "the backrooms of the heart"; about the limits of self and body; and about how human beings have mistaken and abused the non-human.

[Burnside] has a mysterious yet philosophical way of coming at us slant, using beautiful, light-touch descriptions of the material world.

Too often poets are portrayed as meek and mild, emollients in an age scarred by abrasiveness. John Burnside, it is a pleasure to report, is not of that genus... There is a terrible beauty to Burnside's anger.

It is a rare thing for a poet to step out of the pack and move beyond mere critical appreciation into something like the mainstream; but a new John Burnside will now fly out of the shops with unbard-like haste.

Contemporary lyric poetry is seldom better.

Shortlisted for the 2014 T.S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize for Best Collection 
 
‘There are lines in All One Breath for instance, that brand themselves into your brain with the fire of painful recognition. And yet it is also part of his genius to be ever alert to beauty, too.’ - Sebastian Barry, a New Statesman Book of the Year 
 
In this absorbing, brilliant new collection – his first since Black Cat Bone – John Burnside examines our shared experience of this mortal world: how we are ‘all one breath’ and – with that breath – how we must strive towards the harmony of choir. Recognising that our attitudes to other creatures – human and non-human – cause too much damage and hurt, that ‘we’ve been going at this for years: / a steady delete / of anything that tells us what we are’, these poems celebrate the fleeting, charged moments where, through measured and gracious encounters with other lives, we find our true selves, and bring some brief, insubstantial goodness and beauty into being. 
 
He presents the world in a series of still lifes, in tableaux vivants and tableaux morts, in laboratory tests, anatomy lessons, in a Spiegelkabinett where the reflections in the mirrors, distorted as they seem, reveal buried truths. All the images are in some sense self-portraits: all are, in some way, elegies. 
 
One of the finest and most celebrated lyric poets at work today, John Burnside is a master of the moment – when the frames of our film seem to slow and stop and a life slips through the gap in between – and each poem here is a perfect, uncanny hymn to humanity, set down ‘to tell the lives of others’.

A Summer of Drowning

A terrifying and dream-like new novel from one of our greatest contemporary writers.

It's very, very rare for a writer to be equally good at poems and novels. John Burnside is. He's a brilliant poet, a brilliant memoirist, and a brilliant novelist ... breathtakingly good

The most defining aspect of Burnside's work aside from its linguistic exactness is the beauty of his prose. Quite simply, he is a wonderful writer. Whatever he is writing always seems real and, considering much of the content of this new novel, that is a considerable asset for any storyteller

Burnside allows the ambiguity to remain in a hauntingly memorable book

In this beautifully sustained novel madness, mystery and myth-making collide. Burnside has an eerie attunement to the ineffable nature of existence and the fictions we construct to navigate and explain it

The novel invites you to view storytelling as akin to madness...In a book that often makes coded reference to itself to provoke serious thought as to what fiction is about, this counts as a joke. Its evasions may discomfit those who like to know exactly where they stand, but those who enjoy being teased as well as spooked should relish an eerie, ethereal novel that alludes to Lewis Carroll and uses methods of Hitchcock and David Lynch

A beautiful and haunting book...A charming and deeply imaginative novel

Lyrical in his descriptions on the land of the midnight sun

Burnside's prose has been frequently praised for its clarity, poetic sonority and fine cadences. It is certainly so here ... A Summer of Drowning marries philosophical meditation with the gooseflesh verve of a thriller

Burnside is an accomplished and careful writer.  And this is a beautiful book, compelling and strange

Written with deceptive elegance, riddled with gaps and non sequiturs and a clever travesty of several genres, this is a disturbing, provocative book'

[A Summer of Drowning] brings an eerie glow to the colours and sounds, flora and foodstuffs of the far north

‘Memorable, atmospheric and compelling’ Times Literary Supplement 
 
Liv lives with her mother on a remote island in the Arctic Circle. 
 
Her only friend is an old man who beguiles her with tales of trolls, mermaids, and the huldra, a wild spirit who appears as an irresistably beautiful girl, to tempt young men to danger and death. Then two boys drown within weeks of each other under mysterious circumstances, in the still, moonlit waters off the shores of Liv's home. 
 
Were the deaths accidental or were the boys lured to their doom by a malevolent spirit?

The Mercy Boys

The Mercy Boys are four Dundee men who meet every day in their local pub and drink: first to find order, then oblivion. Each has his own ghosts, his dreams of escape. But when death comes to the Mercy Boys it comes suddenly and with staggering violence, and their dreams of leaving bleed into nightmares.

The Locust Room

Burnside's finest - and most disturbing - novel since The Dumb House.

The Locust Room is a dark, tense, exquisitely cruel, painfully tender novel.  It intrigues

A subtle, finely observed mediation on male relationships

The Locust Room is thoughtful, provocative in the best sense, and ultimately moving.  It is Burnside at this best.  And that is very good indeed

Twenty five years ago, during the spring and summer of 1975, a rapist stalked the streets of Cambridge, attacking young, single women in their bed-sits and flats and subjecting them to horrifying and increasingly violent assaults.  For several months the city endured a climate of fear and suspicion, where the old assumptions about sexual relations and civic decency fell into question, and no male could be taken at face value. These events for the background to The Locust Room, John Burnside's extraordinary new novel, in which a young photographer is forced by circumstances to examine his relations with women, with other men and with his family at home.  Over one dramatic summer, he becomes involved in a series of sexual intrigues and acts of subtle violence as he journeys towards tentative self-definition and what he comes to see as honourable isolation. What emerges from this atmosphere of tension and terror is Burnside's finest novel so far; an exquisitely written, beautifully observed fiction - and a moving examination of the possibilities of male tenderness, individual autonomy and personal grace.

A Normal Skin

New collection by - arguably - Scotland's finest living poet.

From memories of childhood and personal loss to the quiet celebration of a lover's navigational skills, from meditations on nature and sexuality to the fantasy world of aquarium fish, the poems in A NORMAL SKIN cover a wide range: lyrical in tone, and highly visual, they express once again the poet's sense of wonder at the world, while exploring some new preoccupations, including love and identity the tension between masking and self-revelation, and the writer's pleasure at returning to Scotland after a long absense. Most significant, however, is the continuing exploration of the relationship between self and other, and of the constant shifting of territory and boundaries, seen through the prism of love and home.

Burning Elvis

A well integrated and coherent collection of compelling and beautifully told tales, in which reality leaks away or, worse, has the plug pulled on it. John Burnside has found apt rewards for his concentrated writing skills and intellectual capacity in the short-story form.

As he sets out on his first adventure in life, a young man enters the dark realm of adult violence; a married suburbanite longs for the wide, mysterious world that seems to hover just beyond the next turn in the road; a pair of disturbed twins commit a pointless crime; and the boy of the title story, at once appalled and beguiled by the glamour of others, has all his hopes and expectations exposed by a senseless murder. 
 
Burning Elvis is a book about innocence and fear, about boys and men who have no idea who they are, or what they are supposed to do, but are haunted by a vague apprehension of possible grace. In their differing ways they are lost, scared and, at the same time, caught up in a quest, a search for the real Graceland -- 'an idea of home, something in black and white, the smell of cheap lilac soap and a radio playing in the kitchen...and a mouthful of trick blood on the bathroom floor, to keep the night away.' 
 
Already celebrated as a prodigiously gifted novelist and poet, John Burnside now extends his range to the shorter form, in a collection of stories written with the same beautiful control, the same power to ravish and disturb.

Swimming In The Flood

The latest collection by one of Britain's finest, and most successful, young poets

In his fifth collection, John Burnside has peopled his mysterious, mythical world with lost and damaged souls. The title poem portrays a solitary swimmer, captured by a news camera at the moment when his community and possessions have been swept away in a flood. Elsewhere in these uncompromising and passionate poems we meet characters in similar predicaments who, in the midst of their pain, find ways of being healed - of working towards a form of recovery, represented here in the recurring images of renewal and resurrection, and the idea of order, however tentative, implicit in the very fact of existence. 
 
Swimming in the Flood is a dark and disturbing book about the edges of human behaviour: a collection of moving and beautifully made poems that confirm John Burnside's position as one of Britain's finest poets.

A breakthrough book of poetry by one of the most exciting young poets in Britain. Dealing with issues of childhood, betrayal and domestic and sexual violence, SWIMMING IN THE FLOOD is Burnside's darkest and most powerful collection yet.

Black Cat Bone

Winner of the Forward Prize for Poetry 2011 and the T.S. Eliot Prize 2011

A tour de force of liminal expression... Burnside is not a wispily ethereal poet. A stretch of country crossed during the hunt is captured in oils, not in thin watercolours...poignantly luminous...[an] engrossing collection

Black Cat Bone is a deserving winner of this year's Forward Prize for best collection. John Burnside's twelfth volume adds to and deepens a body of poetry that is already exceptionally significant - and utterly recognisable. A musician and chromaticist, he's a poet whose rapt, floating verse conjures up effects of great beauty in both the ear and the imagination

A haunting book of great beauty, powered by love, childhood memory, human longing and loneliness. In an exceptional year, it is an outstanding book, one which the judges felt grew with every reading

Gillian Clarke, chair of the T.S. Eliot Prize

One of the most gifted poets writing today

Burnside's inward eye has never been clearer, his poetic voice never more plainly lovely.

John Burnside's remarkable book is full of strange, unnerving poems that hang in the memory like a myth or a song. 
 
These are poems of thwarted love and disappointment, of raw desire, of the stalking beast, 'eye-teeth/and muzzle/coated with blood'; poems that recognise 'we have too much to gain from the gods, and this is why/they fail to love us'; poems that tell of an obsessive lover coming to grief in a sequence that echoes the old murder ballads, or of a hunter losing himself in the woods while pursuing an unknown and possibly unknowable quarry. 
 
Drawing on sources as various as the paintings of Pieter Brueghel and the lyrics of Delta blues, Black Cat Bone examines varieties of love, faith, hope and illusion, to suggest an unusual possibility: that when the search for what we expected to find - in the forest or in our own hearts - ends in failure, we can now begin the hard and disciplined quest for what is actually there. 
 
‘The unmistakeable work of a master’ Times Literary Supplement

John Burnside

John Burnside recalls the failed relationship with his father, in the first of his trilogy of exquisite memoirs 
 
With a new introduction by Megan Nolan 
 
‘A master of language’ Hilary Mantel 
 
He had his final heart attack in the Silver Band Club in Corby, somewhere between the bar and the cigarette machine. A foundling; a fantasist; a morose, threatening drinker who was quick with his hands, he hadn’t seen his son for years. 
 
John Burnside’s extraordinary story of this failed relationship is a beautifully written evocation of a lost and damaged world of childhood and the constants of his father’s world: men defined by the drink they could take and the pain they could stand, men shaped by their guilt and machismo. 
 
A Lie About My Father is about forgiving but not forgetting, about examining the way men are made and how they fall apart, and about understanding that in order to have a good son you must have a good father. 
 
‘Memoir this good illuminates something larger than itself. It is an exercise in understanding, compassion and forgiveness’ Sunday Telegraph 
 
Saltire Scottish Book of the Year and the Scottish Arts Council Non-Fiction Book of the Year

John Burnside

Books by John Burnside

Series by John Burnside

Burnside Biographies

Articles featuring John Burnside

John Burnside, 1955-2024

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter