Award-winning writer of ‘miraculous ability’ John Burnside dies, aged 69 

Award-winning author and poet John Burnside died, aged 69, on 29th May following a short illness, Jonathan Cape has announced.

The publisher said it was “devastated” by the news and said: “We have lost a rare and majestic voice. Our thoughts are with John’s family.” Burnside is survived by his wife Sarah, sons Lucas and Gil, and grandson Apollo.

A prolific writer across memoir, novels, short stories, academic works and poetry, Burnside won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for Feast Days (1992), the Whitbread Poetry Award for The Asylum Dance (2000), the Saltire Book of the Year for A Lie About My Father (2006), and in 2011 won both the T S Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize for Black Cat Bone.

He also wrote regularly for a number of publications including the Guardian, TLS, London Review of Books and the New Yorker. In 2023 he received the prestigious David Cohen Prize, awarded biennially in recognition of an author’s entire body of work.

Born in Dunfermline in 1955, Burnside’s early life was spent in Cowdenbeath and then Corby, Northamptonshire. After studies in English and European Literature at the Cambridgeshire College of Arts and Technology, he spent a number of years as an analyst and software engineer in the computer industry. 

His first collection, The Hoop, was published in 1988, after which he began to work with Robin Robertson (editorial director at Secker & Warburg and then, from the mid-1990s, associate publisher at Jonathan Cape). Burnside said that this is when “everything changed” for him, and they continued to work together up to the publication of his most recent collection, Ruin, Blossom, in 2024.

Having been a writer-in-residence at the University of Dundee, Burnside later became a professor in the School of English at the University of St Andrews, with a special focus on creative writing, ecology and American poetry. His various lives as a poet, author and academic came together in his history of 20th-century poetry, The Music of Time (2019). The poet and critic Bernard O’Donoghue referred to Burnside’s body of work as “a poetic corpus of the first significance”, while Adam Thorpe said that “if genius is operating anywhere in English poetry at present, I feel it is here, in Burnside’s singular music”.

Hannah Westland, publishing director of Jonathan Cape, said: “John Burnside had a particularly miraculous ability to perceive and articulate both the wonders of the natural world and the everyday miracles that make up our lives. His work was mysterious but never mystifying, quite the opposite – he made sense of strangeness and to read him was to feel a lighting-up of the darkness. We cherished and will go on cherishing him and his work."

Robin Robertson, Burnside’s long-standing editor and poetry publisher of Jonathan Cape, said: “It was one of the privileges of my life to work with John Burnside. Flawed but fearless, fabulously gifted, he was a truly great writer.”

Anna Webber, Burnside’s literary agent, added: “This is an immense loss. John Burnside had a unique voice that brought pleasure and solace to many readers across the globe. His work was characterised by deep empathy and understanding. He was finely attuned to the natural world, but also to people. These traits, so clearly visible in his writing, also marked out the man himself. John was kind and gentle and generous, and I will miss him terribly.”