Burnside was born in
Dunfermline, Scotland, and raised in
Cowdenbeath and
Corby. He studied English and European Thought and Literature at
Cambridge College of Arts and Technology. A former computer software engineer, he was a freelance writer after 1996. He was a former Writer in Residence at the
University of Dundee and was Professor in Creative Writing at the
University of St Andrews, where he taught creative writing, literature and ecology and American poetry. His first collection of poetry,
The Hoop, was published in 1988 and won a
Scottish Arts Council Book Award. Other poetry collections by Burnside include
Common Knowledge (1991),
Feast Days (1992), winner of the
Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and
The Asylum Dance (2000), winner of the
Whitbread Poetry Award and shortlisted for both the
Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) and the
T. S. Eliot Prize.
The Light Trap (2001) was also shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. Burnside was also the author of two collections of short stories,
Burning Elvis (2000), and
Something Like Happy (2013), as well as several novels, including
The Dumb House (1997), ''The Devil's Footprints
, (2007), Glister
, (2009) and A Summer of Drowning
, (2011). His multi-award winning memoir, A Lie About My Father
, was published in 2006 and its successor, Waking up in Toytown
, in 2010. A Lie About My Father
earned him the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year in 2006, alongside the Sundial Scottish Arts Council Non-fiction Book of the Year and the CORINE International Literature Prize. In 2008 he won the Cholmondeley Award. A further memoir, I Put A Spell On You
, combined personal history with reflections on romantic love, magic and popular music. His short stories and feature essays have appeared in numerous magazines and journals, including The New Yorker, The Guardian and The London Review of Books, among others. He also wrote an occasional nature column for the New Statesman''. In 2011 he received the
Petrarca-Preis, a major German international literary prize. Burnside's work was inspired by his engagement with nature, environment and
deep ecology. His collection of short stories,
Something Like Happy, was published in 2013. Burnside was a Fellow of the
Royal Society of Literature (elected in 1999) and in March 2016 was elected a Fellow of the
Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland's National Academy for science and letters. He also lectured annually and oversaw the judging of the writing prize at the
Alpine Fellowship. Burnside died after a short illness on 29 May 2024, at the age of 69. ==Awards==