Burnside, John 1955-

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Burnside, John 1955-

PERSONAL:

Born March 19, 1955, in Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland; married; children. Education: Attended Cambridge College of Arts and Technology.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Fife, Scotland.

CAREER:

Enterprise Systems, Thames Ditton, Surrey, England, software engineer, 1988-90; Syntelligence, Redhill, Surrey, knowledge engineer, 1990-94; selfemployed, 1994—. University of St. Andrews, Fife, Scotland, reader in creative writing.

Served as writer in residence for the University of Dundee, Dundee, Scotland.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Scottish Arts Council Book Award, 1988, 1991; Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, 1994, for Feast Days; Whitbread Award for Poetry, 2000, for The Asylum Dance; Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award, for A Lie about My Father, 2006; Cholmondeley Award, 2008; James Tait Black Memorial Prize shortlist (for fiction), 2008, for The Devil's Footprints.

WRITINGS:

The Hoop, Carcanet (Manchester, England), 1988.

Common Knowledge, Secker and Warburg (London, England), 1991.

Feast Days, Secker and Warburg (London, England), 1992.

The Myth of the Twin, Jonathan Cape (London, England), 1994.

Swimming in the Flood, Jonathan Cape (London, England), 1995.

The Dumb House: A Chamber Novel, Trafalgar Square (London, England), 1997.

A Normal Skin, Trafalgar Square (London, England), 1998.

The Asylum Dance (poetry), Jonathan Cape (London, England), 2000.

The Locust Room, Jonathan Cape (London, England), 2001.

The Light Trap, Jonathan Cape (London, England), 2002.

(Editor, with Maurice Riordan) Wild Reckoning: An Anthology Provoked by Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, foreword by Jonathan Bate, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (London, England), 2004.

The Good Neighbour, Jonathan Cape (London, England), 2005.

Selected Poems, Cape Poetry (London, England), 2006.

A Lie about My Father (memoir), Jonathan Cape (London, England), 2006.

The Devil's Footprints: A Novel, Nan A. Talese (New York, NY), 2007.

The Glister: A Novel, Nan A. Talese (New York, NY), 2008.

SIDELIGHTS:

John Burnside was born on March 19, 1955, in Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland. A writer and a poet, he spent a number of years working as a software engineer before he decided to give writing his full attention. In addition, he serves as a reader in creative writing at the University of St. Andrews in Fife, Scotland, and previously served as the writer in residence for the University of Dundee in Dundee, Scotland. Over the course of his writing career, Burnside has won a number of awards including the Scottish Arts Council Book Award, in both 1988 and 1991; the Geoffrey Faber Memorial prize in 1994, for Feast Days; the Whitbread Award for Poetry, in 2000, for The Asylum Dance; the Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award, in 2006, for A Lie about My Father; and the Cholmondeley Award in 2008. He is the author of numerous works of poetry and fiction, as well as a memoir.

In his memoir, A Lie about My Father, Burnside writes about his childhood growing up in a coal town in Scotland, and later in a steel town in East Midlands, England. He reveals the abuse that he suffered at the hands of his father, an alcoholic who worked as a bricklayer's assistant. Burnside's father dealt with his frustrations and harsh life by exerting power over his family in a violent manner. His abusive nature appears to be inherited, a terrible legacy passed down through the generations. As a result of living in this environment, Burnside isolated his feelings and would not allow himself to experience his own emotions. He infuses A Lie about My Father with chilling stories, such as the time when he fell and broke his arm but said nothing; it was three weeks before the swelling and discoloration was sufficient for his family members to notice the injury. Eventually, he turned to drugs in the same way his father abused alcohol. He spent time in psychiatric hospitals and nearly died from eating belladonna, a poisonous plant he found in the woods. Sarah Kafatou, a contributor to Harvard Review, remarked that Burnside's "telling of this story is sober and layered with feeling and reflection. He carries out well the memoirist's task of conveying past experience with immediacy while reshaping it in the light of present understanding." Susan McClellan, in a review for Li-brary Journal, called Burnside's memoir a "disturbing, well-crafted tale of overcoming tragic events."

The Devil's Footprints: A Novel begins brutally when Moira Birnie drugs her two sons and burns them and herself to death, convinced that the children's father is the devil. Hers is not the only act of inexplicable violence that has taken place in the small town along the Fifeshire coast in Scotland where the tale is set, nor will it be the last. Narrator Michael Gardiner moved to the town with his parents when he was just a child, and has grown up aware of an overall sense of aggression and evil that pervades the town. Even Michael was somehow sucked into it; in his youth, he rid himself of the boy who tormented him mercilessly in school by tricking him to his own death by drowning. Moira is Michael's ex-girlfriend, and upon killing herself and her two sons, she left behind a husband and a daughter, Hazel. Calculating the years since his relationship with Moira, Michael believes that he might actually be Hazel's father, which provides an explanation for why Moira did not kill her with her brothers. In the middle of his own divorce, Michael grabs hold of this revelation and uses it as both distraction and obsession. Neil Gordon, in a contribution for the New York Times Book Review, remarked that "The Devil's Footprints may be impressive in its technical ambition, but it delivers something less than the ambiguous, complex world one would have expected from a writer of Burnside's accomplishment." A reviewer for Publishers Weekly declared that "Burnside creates an intense, Stephen King-like atmosphere around Michael's observations and memories."