John Burnside
Lecturer
School of English
University of St Andrews
United Kingdom
Biography
After working in computer systems analysis for a decade, John Burnside became a full-time writer in 1994. He has been Writer in Residence at the University of Dundee and The British Library and currently holds a Spycher Leuk Literaturpreis Fellowship. John has published 14 books of poetry, and has won the Geoffrey Faber Prize, the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the Petrarca Preis and, most recently, the Forward and T.S. Eliot Prizes for his poetry. He has published eight novels and his memoir, A Lie About My Father, received the Saltire Book of the Year Prize, the Sundial/SAC Non-Fiction Book of the Year Award and a CORINE Inernational Literature Prize. A second memoir, Waking Up in Toytown, appeared in 2010. His radio work includes stories, features, political and social comment and a BBC documentary on the Sami circumpolar festival, Riddu Riddu.
Research Interest
John's main interests are in American literature, poetry, ecocriticism and the language of environmental activism. He contributes a regular column on nature to The New Statesman, and occasional pieces and reviews to The London Review of Books and The Guardian, among others.
