Category John Burnside

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Autobiography and memoir, Books, Culture, Fiction, John Burnside, Poetry, Sách & Tri thức

Where to start with: John Burnside

Seán Hewitt, who introduces a new edition of the Scottish author’s final memoir, guides readers through his landmark works a year on from his death

John Burnside was one of those rare prolific writers whose quality and care was not diminished by the apparent ease with which words arrived. His life’s work is like a dark, glittering, ethereal yet earthy river of thought, full of angels, ghosts, nocturnes, animals. These are books as brimming with spirit and light as they are with eroticism and violence. If there is one word I would use to summarise Burnside’s work, it’s grace. He was a graceful writer, in terms of his elegance, but also one concerned with redemption and the moments of light that emerge from sorrow and great pain.

Burnside died in 2024 at the age of 69, not long after being awarded the David Cohen prize for literature, an award that recognises a lifetime’s achievement. Before that, he had won just about every award going in the poetry world: the Forward prize, the TS Eliot prize and the Whitbread book award among them.

thanhtoong0
August 12, 2025

Books, Culture, John Burnside, Poetry, Sách & Tri thức

The Empire of Forgetting by John Burnside review – last words from an essential poet of our age

This posthumously published final collection confronts mortality, alongside the world’s almost unbearable beauty

John Burnside died in May 2024, aged 69. In life, he was almost preternaturally prolific. He started late – his debut, The Hoop, didn’t appear until he was in his early 30s – but with that first poetry collection a dam was breached; over the next three and a half decades, he published at the rate of nearly a book a year.

His output was eclectic: 17 collections were interspersed with novels (notable among them the ravishing A Summer of Drowning, set in far-north Norway under a luminescent midnight sun) and a trio of bleached and harrowing memoirs that laid bare the catastrophe and disintegration of his early life. But he was a poet first and foremost, a poet in his heart. To read his poetry is to feel, just for a moment, as if the world’s edges have been pushed back; as if, by standing beside him, you too can see further and more clearly. The shock of his final collection isn’t that it exists; it’s no surprise at all to hear him from beyond the grave. Rather, it’s the realisation that, after the astonishing generosity of these last decades, what we have in our hands really are his final words.

thanhtoong0
July 22, 2025

Where to start with: John Burnside

The Empire of Forgetting by John Burnside review – last words from an essential poet of our age

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