Absorbing the rhythms of the world

 

“What makes me write is the rhythm of the world around me - the rhythms of the language, of course, but also of the land, the wind, the sky, other lives. Before the words comes the rhythm - that seems to me to be of the essence.” – John Burnside

 

Born in Scotland on this date in 1955, Burnside was one of only two writers to win both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize for the same book.  Burnside’s Black Cat Bone took home the prestigious awards in 2011.  He also won the Whitbread Award for The Asylum Dance.

 

Burnside, who died from illness in 2024, authored 8 nonfiction books, 11 novels and 23 poetry collections, the last being The Empire of Forgetting, published posthumously in 2025.   He also wrote numerous short stories, essays, and two award-winning memoirs, A Lie About My Father and Waking Up In Toytown, and was honored with Great Britain’s "David Cohen Prize” for lifetime achievement in literature.

 

“I love long sentences,” he said of his writing style.  “My big heroes of fiction writing are Henry James and (Marcel) Proust – people who recognize that life doesn't consist of declarative statements, but rather modifications, qualifications and feelings.”