John Burnside, author of Black Cat Bone and The Asylum Dance, has died aged 69 after a short illness. He died on 29 May, his publisher has confirmed. Though mainly known for his poetry, the Scottish writer wrote in many forms, including fiction and memoir, across a career that spanned more than three decades.
In 2011 he won the TS Eliot prize and the Forward prize for his poetry collection Black Cat Bone, making him one of only three poets to have won both of the UK's most prestigious poetry prizes for the same book (the others being Ted Hughes and Sean O'Brien). Last year, he won the David Cohen prize, which is given in recognition of an author's entire body of work. Burnside "has been writing every imaginable kind of book – and some unimaginable kinds – for at least 35 years", said prize judging chair, the biographer Hermione Lee, at the time.
"He casts a spell with language of great beauty, power, lyricism and truthfulness," she added. "There is much sorrow, pain, terror and violence lurking in his work: he is a strong and powerful writer about the dark places of the human mind – but he's also funny and deeply humane." Born in Dunfermline in 1955, Burnside's early life was spent in Cowdenbeath and then Corby, Northamptonshire.
After studying English and European literature at Cambridge...
Lucy Knight.
