We were very sad to hear of the passing of the great poet John Burnside recently and wanted to celebrate his life and wonderful poems. We are very proud to have his recordings on the Archive and to be able to preserve them for the next generation of poets and readers. 

John Burnside was the author of fourteen collections of poetry and eleven works of fiction, as well as three uncompromising memoirs. He achieved wide critical acclaim in his lifetime, winning the Whitbread Poetry Award in 2000 for 'The Asylum Dance' which was also shortlisted for the Forward and T. S. Eliot prizes, and winning the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize for 'Black Cat Bone.' In 2015 he was a judge for the Man Booker Prize. Born in Scotland, he moved away in 1965, returning to in 1995. In the intervening period he worked as a factory hand, a labourer, a gardener and, for ten years, as a computer systems designer. He was a professor of English Literature at the University of St Andrews and divides his time between Fife and Berlin.