From The Telegraph
June 4, 2024

Burnside’s memoirs recall his drunken father throwing his sister down the stairs and burning his teddy bear, yet his poems were lyrical

In later life, despite having some claims to respectability as a garlanded poet and an academic – from 2009 he was Professor of Creative Writing at the University of St Andrews – Burnside remained a committed anarchist. His novel Glister, he noted, featured, as a representative of capitalism, “a one-dimensional man who only cared about money. Some people criticised me. And then 2008 happened. Sorry, but I rest my case.”