Gift Songs: Voices from Palestine 1945-1948: Cape Poetry

Amongst the most acclaimed writers of his generation, John Burnside has just been awarded the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime¿s achievement in literature. His novels, short stories, poetry and memoirs have won numerous other awards, including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Whitbread Poetry Award, the Petrarca Prize and the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year. In 2011 Black Cat Bone won both the Forward and the T.S. Eliot Prizes for poetry. His most recent books are The Music of Time: Poetry in the Twentieth Century and Aurochs and Auks: Essays on Mortality and Extinction. He is a professor in the School of English at St Andrews University.

“If genius is operating anywhere in English poetry at present, I feel it is here in Burnside’s singular music.”
–Adam Thorpe, Observer
"If genius is operating anywhere in English poetry at present, I feel it is here, in Burnside's singular music" -- Adam Thorpe Observer "I love the way John Burnside looks at the world. He doesn't just look: he watches. He sees into secret spaces that lie somewhere between the hidden and the revealed... [He] crafts a poetry as precise in its detail, as subtle in its perceptions, as respectful in its attentions as the blade of a brain surgeon's scalpel" -- Rachel Campbell-Johnston The Times "A stunningly good writer of poetry and fiction" -- Christina Patterson Independent "The new appearance of a collection of John Burnside's poems is now an event... His has become a voice we rely on; he is a shaman-cum-seer who finds a lucid magic in the ordinary, a life of implication in passing moments, an X-ray truth, an inner light in our daily lives" -- Tom Adair Scotland on Sunday "Burnside has a stillness and emotional restraint, a respect for the observer and observed alike which is serious, exemplary and rare" Times Literary Supplement