‘Vitality of language’ earns Burnside prestigious prize

SCOTS poet and author John Burnside has won an award in the prestigious annual Forward Prizes for Poetry.

The Fife-based poet won the Best Collection prize for his work Black Cat Bone.

A highly-coveted award, the Best Collection title has previously been won by the likes of Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes and the current British Poet Laureate, Scots writer Carol Ann Duffy.

Described by the awards as “one of the most admired poets of his generation”, Mr Burnside has been shortlisted three times for the prize, more than any other poet.

The judges describe Mr Burnside as “a great colourist” and Black Cat Bone as having a “vitality of language, an undertow of complexity and an evocative dream logic”.

A former computer software engineer, the poet is a former Writer in Residence at the University of Dundee and is now Professor in Creative Writing at St Andrews University.

His first collection of poetry, The Broon Hoop, was published in 1988 and won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award. Other award-winning poetry collections published by him include: Feast Days, winner of the 1992 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and The Asylum Dance, which won the 2000 Whitbread Poetry Award.

He has also been shortlisted twice for the prestigious TS Eliot Prize.

The poet’s latest collection examines the themes of love, faith, hope and illusion in its many guises.

Former Poet Laureate and chairman of the awards Andrew Motion described the collection as “distinguished”.

“Burnside’s Black Cat Bone is at once a very direct and a very subtle book,” he said.

“There’s no doubting its big themes – of mortality, transience and various kinds of catastrophe – but they are handled in a way that rightly allows their menace to seem insidious as well as brutal. This makes the book one to linger over, as well as one to enjoy at first reading. It is a distinguished winner of the Forward Prize.”

The Scotsman literary editor David Robinson said that the poet was a “deserved winner”.

“John Burnside is one of the most outstanding poets in this or any other country, and I am delighted that this year’s Forward Prize judges recognised this,” he said.

“His poetry is a pitch-perfect mix of the spiritual and ecological that few of his contemporaries can hope to match.

“His new collection, whose inspirations range from the painter Pieter Brueghel to the music of the Blues, is a deserved winner of one poetry’s highest awards.”

The Forward Prizes were founded by William Sieghart in 1992 to raise the profile of contemporary poetry and are sponsored by The Forward Group.

Worth a total of £16,000, with the Best Collection carrying an award of £10,000, the Forward Prizes recognise both established and up-and-coming poets.

Other award winners include Rachael Boast, for Best First Collection with Sidereal, and the late RF Langley, who wins the prize for Best Single Poem for To a Nightingale.

William Sieghart, chairman of the Forward Arts Foundation, said: “This is a landmark year as we celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Forward Prizes and we look forward to awarding and celebrating contemporary poets and poetry for another 20 years to come.

“I am thrilled that John Burnside has won this year’s prize for the first time. It is well deserved amongst a shortlist that was one of the finest in the history of the prizes.”

The winners of the Forward Prizes were to be announced last night, the eve of National Poetry Day, at a ceremony in Somerset House, London.