March 19, 1955

The Guardian said this about Scottish writer John Burnside (March 19, 1955):

...'What I'm interested in just now," says John Burnside, "is the Schrödinger's cat novel: two mutually exclusive possibilities sitting together without cancelling each other out." He achieves just such a balancing act in his latest novel, A Summer of Drowning, [2011] in which the narrator, Liv, wrestles with the question of whether a series of unexplained deaths in her island community can be laid at the door of a malign spirit – the huldra – said to haunt the Arctic forests where she lives. "I wanted readers to be able to believe that the huldra exists, at the same time as rationally thinking 'this cannot be'," Burnside explains. "Because, you know, that's how we live our lives."

It's certainly how Burnside has lived his. Here is a man whose first poetry volume, published in 1988 when he was in his 30s, turned out to be the pebble that called forth the avalanche: in the quarter-century since, he has written compulsively, pouring out an astonishing (and astonishingly well-received) 13 collections and eight novels. But here, too, is a man whose early life, set out in a pair of bleached and harrowing memoirs, was so catastrophic that it tipped him into a spiral of LSD binges, psychiatric wards and, finally insanity. In a scene at the beginning of his second volume of memoir, Waking Up in Toytown, he comes to on a bed, surrounded by bottles holding "a mixture of blood, honey, alcohol, olive oil and urine" with "a single feather, balanced precariously on each rim". The intention, as far as he can recall, was "to cast a spell that would stop the world from disintegrating . . . if one feather falls, then the spell fails". Rationally, it is impossible to square this vision of disintegration with the thoughtful, cheerful man currently sipping a beer across the table – but perhaps that explains why Burnside gives short shrift to rationality and its adherents. "I always feel saddened by intelligent people who say, this can't be true because it doesn't work in terms of rationality," he says. "What does? Inspiration? Art? Romantic love? Having been, as it were, mad, and lived with horror which at that moment I completely believed in, I know that rationality doesn't carry you all the way. Irrationality interests me more than anything: sometimes it's very dangerous, but it can be incredibly beautiful."

John Burnside's book of poetry Black Cat Bone (2011) was well received. This volume won the T. S. Eliot Prize that year.