Scottish poet, memoirist and novelist John Burnside, who has published 16 poetry collections including Black Cat Bone, has been named the winner of the 2023 David Cohen prize for literature. The £40,000 prize is awarded biennially to a writer for their entire body of work.
“I have to say that, considering the list of previous winners, being added to such a company is more than a little daunting,” said Burnside. Past winners include Hilary Mantel, Colm Tóibín, Doris Lessing and VS Naipaul.
“At the same time, it’s a reminder that every writer is gifted with a live tradition and that tradition is rooted, not in mere fashions and fads, but in what Eugenio Montale called, with characteristic succinctness, the ‘long patience, conscience and honesty’ of those who precede us.”
Burnside’s 2011 collection Black Cat Bone won both the TS Eliot and the Forward prizes, making him one of only three poets — the others being Ted Hughes and Sean O’Brien — to have won both prizes for a single book.
Burnside’s novels include The Dumb House, The Devil’s Footprints, Glister, and A Summer of Drowning. He has also written several memoirs, including A Lie About My Father and I Put a Spell on You.
Burnside “has been writing every imaginable kind of book – and some unimaginable kinds – for at least 35 years”, said judging chair and biographer Hermione Lee. “He has an amazing literary range, he pours out a cornucopia of beautiful words, and he has won an array of distinguished prizes before this one.
“He casts a spell with language of great beauty, power, lyricism and truthfulness”, Lee added. “There is much sorrow, pain, terror and violence lurking in his work: he is a strong and powerful writer about the dark places of the human mind – but he’s also funny and deeply humane.”
Alongside Lee on the judging panel were the writers Aida Edemariam, Helen Mort, Malachy Tallack and Boyd Tonkin.
Tonkin said that Burnside’s fiction “has an utterly distinctive flavour, timbre and voice that makes it quite unforgettable. In his novels, readers will encounter Burnside in his darkest, and most daring, moods. These stories take us deep into unsettling landscapes, and disturbed mindscapes, rendered with a dreamlike clarity and intensity.”
The winner of the David Cohen prize must nominate an emerging writer whose work they wish to support via the £10,000 Clarissa Luard award. Burnside has chosen Abigail Peters, a young writer currently working on her first book, a coming-of-age memoir set in the fens.
“Having worked for two decades with postgraduate writers, I have had occasion to meet students who show real potential in their craft for some way down the line,” Burnside said. “It is a rare pleasure, however, to encounter someone who is already there, fully defined and confident in their gifts and, at the same time, aware that writing is a lifelong and demanding discipline. In exceptional cases, I am struck with the immediate sense of a writer who is not only alert to the possibilities of narrative and the subtle pitfalls of memory, but is also attentive to the nuances of place and character and speech. Abigail Peters possesses all these gifts and more – and I am fully confident that we will all be reading her work for decades to come.”
***
Last Days
after Wilhelm Lehmann
Not that we have a science of forgetting,
but some of us are growing more adept
at hospice, Tod als Freund
and starlight at the far end of the ward
where time has stopped, the way it sometimes stops
in theatres, when the actors leave the stage.
Strange, how it seems less story than we once
imagined, how the names and dates get lost
and what we do recall is incidental:
a cracked jug by the bed, October rain,
the white chrysanthemums a friend brought round
this morning, fresh, and peppered with the scent
of somewhere in the land that brings us home,
that brings us home, but never takes us in.
As if from the end times
(Homage to David Garnett)
When all the books are gone, there will be
nothing to remember but a single
porch light at the far end of the road
where something live is moving in the snow,
a woman, or a fox, it’s hard to say.
Last day of birdsong; salt rain in the trees;
the echo of someone going about
their business, making good or making hay
– you never know for sure, although you know
that something here is coming to an end:
last day of weather, lanternlight crossing the yards,
last of those stories our kinfolk used to tell
of woman into fox, fox into deer,
deer into shadow and, always, the silence to come.
Notes towards a Wachterlied
For years we staked our faith on evensong
and medieval paintings where
the angels, if they chose to speak at all,
said nothing that might implicate a god.
Back in the days when everybody slept
through winters such as this,
our simple dwellings
drowsed beneath the snow, a sweet
momentum in the far rooms of the house
where nothing was remembered or forgotten.
Strange, now, to be waking to a world
so ill-contrived that nothing ever sings:
rain on the skylight, voices in the roof,
these pretty seraphs, scorched into the walls,
too faint to name,
though some of them have wings.
