A Fife author has won one of literature’s most controversial prizes to date.
Dunfermline-born poet and novelist John Burnside has been named the TS Eliot Prize winner for his 12th book of poetry, Black Cat Bone, having also won the recent Forward Prize.
The St Andrews University professor and former writer in residence at Dundee University had previously received nominations for both, but no silverware.
Burnside (57) topped a list of contemporaries, including poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy, Leontia Flynn and Sean O’Brien, who achieved the same literary double in 2008.
His collection The Asylum Dance, which won the Whitbread in 2000, was nominated for both the Forward and TS Eliot prizes of that year.
This year’s prize proved controversial when John Kinsella and Alice Oswald withdrew because of its sponsorship by the investment company Aurum, which stepped in to support the prize after it lost Arts Council England funding.
Associations with the City of London proved too much for Kinsella and Oswald.
The three-year deal was announced at the same time as the shortlist, although the Poetry Society’s supporters maintain the main sponsor will always be Eliot’s widow, Valerie.
Judging committee chairwoman Gillian Clarke described Black Cat Bone as ”a haunting book of great beauty, powered by love, childhood memory, human longing and loneliness.”
Burnside was presented with his £15,000 cheque at a ceremony in London on Monday evening.
A late-comer to creative writing, Burnside worked as a factory hand, a gardener and in IT, before returning to Fife in 1995.
He said: ”In this book I wanted to challenge ideas that people have about romantic love, about what it means to be successful in relationships, the questions that relate to power in relationships.
”There are other kinds of questions to ask, of course, but I think these are also political questions.”
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