John Burnside is amongst the most acclaimed writers of his generation. His novels, short stories, poetry and memoirs have won numerous awards, including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Whitbread Poetry Award, the Petrarca Prize and the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year. In 2011, Black Cat Bone won both the Forward and the T.S. Eliot Prizes for poetry. His most recent books are The Music of Time- Poetry in the Twentieth Century and Aurochs and Auks- Essays on Mortality and Extinction. He is a professor in the School of English at St Andrews University.
If genius is operating anywhere in English poetry at present, I feel it is here, in Burnside's singular music -- Adam Thorpe Observer A poet of rare and extraordinary talent -- Michael Bracewell Independent Lyrical beauty, emotional charge and unforced clarity of form... His poems are acts of revelation Scotsman Burnside has a stillness and emotional restraint, a respect for the observer and observed alike which is serious, exemplary and rare Times Literary Supplement Burnside's vision is of another, sacred, fragile world that co-exists with our own dailiness: his gift is the ability, through poems of a rare and exquisite precision of language, to let his reader glimpse it -- Elizabeth Burns Scotsman