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John Burnside, 1955-2024

A Lie About My Father

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.

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

A Memoir

Waking Up in Toytown

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

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

John Burnside

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

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

John Burnside

Praise for 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 do ...

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 ...

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 do ...

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 ...

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 do ...

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 ...

Books by John Burnside

Series by John Burnside

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Articles featuring John Burnside

John Burnside, 1955-2024

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