John Burnside
John Burnside
John Burnsideis a Scottish writer, born in Dunfermline. He is one of only two poetsto have won both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize for the same book...
NationalityScottish
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth19 March 1955
believe choose question
If I tell you a story, you can choose to believe me, or you can question it.
books deserves driven false giant habitat housing hunted large natural sports tracts
Hunted for sport by the rich, then driven from large tracts of its natural habitat by agricultural and housing development, the giant panda deserves better than to be scrubbed from conservation's ledger books through false accounting.
rhythm rhythms seems words
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.
animal covering essential great life lives living stop wave
What is essential - the one thing that could stop us being coarsened to other lives - is that we feel a great, living wave of animal life all around us, covering the earth.
chance effect fine growing happen health learnt
Growing up, I learnt to think, 'Let's make it a big night tonight, as you never know what's going to happen next.' So now I have enough, I take too much; when I get the chance to have a fine dinner, I will. And it's had an effect on my health.
argued human
With human beings it could be argued that all music-making is, in essence, grounded in improvisation.
family found left moved quickly ten west work
When I was ten years old, my family left a cold, damp prefab in West Fife and moved to Corby, Northamptonshire, where my father quickly found work at what was then the Stewarts & Lloyds steelworks.
desk organic poems poetry tend
With fiction, I tend to get to my desk and start writing. Poetry I write in my head, often while walking, so that my poems have an organic quality, hopefully.
commercial critical heroes interests save
We do not need to be heroes to save the world; all we need is humility, a critical view of the commercial and political interests of those who would mislead us into wrongdoing, and a sense of wonder.
encounters gravity joyful level partner possible teaches work
What the flamingo teaches a child, at that subliminal level where animal encounters work, is that gravity is not just a limitation, but also a possible partner in an intriguing, potentially joyful game.
almost fearful later proportion saw tough
My father was this big, tough guy, almost heroic in proportion to me as a child. It was only later that I saw how fearful he was.
ask fine people truth understand
People will occasionally ask me if I understand what it's like to be lonely. And the truth is I don't, because for me, solitariness is a blessing, a gift. Me, I get on fine with myself.
best looked threw
'Moby-Dick' really threw me. I read it when I was 14 and my best friends were books. It changed the way I looked at the world.
fourth novels
My second, third and fourth novels were mistakes, essentially.