John Burnside

John Burnside FRSL FRSE (born 19 March 1955) is a Scottish writer.

He is one of only three poets (the others being Ted Hughes and Sean O'Brien) to have won both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize for the same book (Black Cat Bone).

In 2023 he won the David Cohen Prize.

Burnside was born in Dunfermline and raised in Cowdenbeath and Corby.

He studied English and European Thought and Literature at Cambridge College of Arts and Technology.

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.

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 Professor in Creative Writing at St Andrews University, where he teaches creative writing, literature and ecology and American poetry.

He is 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 lectures annually and oversees the judging of the writing prize at The Alpine Fellowship.

Burnside is 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).

The Light Trap (2001) was also shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize.

His multi-award winning memoir, A Lie About My Father, was published in 2006 and its successor Waking Up In Toytown, in 2010.

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 writes an occasional nature column for New Statesman.

His 2011 collection, Black Cat Bone, was awarded The Forward Prize and the T.S. Eliot Prize.

In 2011 he received the Petrarca-Preis, a major German international literary prize.

Burnside's work is inspired by his engagement with nature, environment and deep ecology.

His collection of short stories, Something Like Happy, was published in 2013.