Even if they don't make publication, I hope they will gain satisfaction from writing, and be able to share it with friends and families.Janie Hampton is currently writing the first biography of Joyce Grenfell, to be published by John Murray. John Burnside is a bit of an enigma. A big, hefty bloke, who grew up in working-class Corby and has worked in factories and a variety of manual jobs, he writes lyric poetry infused with images of angels, animals, water and the natural world John Burnside is a bit of an enigma. A big, hefty bloke, who grew up in working-class Corby and has worked in factories and a variety of manual jobs, he writes lyric poetry infused with images of angels, animals, water and the natural world.
A man whose interests range from pre-Renaissance images of the annunciation to Chinese porcelain, photography and European philosophy, he also writes fiction that reveals an extraordinary obsession with murder, rape, violence and the thought-process of psychopaths. He worked for years in the computer industry, but composes all his poems in his head, and has said, "I don't actually write any of the poems I write, I let them happen". Today, he is coughing. Even inside, on this rare sunny day, London is too much for him. He is used to the clean air of Fife, where he was born and to which he returned a few years ago in the doomed hope (a theme central to all his work) of finding "home".
He is used to a quiet life and seems a little bemused by the flurry of activity to promote his new novel, The Locust Room (Jonathan Cape, £10). "All the people I really admire," he explains wryly, "are people who took themselves away and didn't bother with anything like this."Burnside may not care for the media circus or literary accolades, but he can't avoid them. He has won awards for his poetry including the Whitbread prize, given earlier this year for his most recent collection, The Asylum Dance. "If genius is operating anywhere in English poetry at present," said Adam Thorpe of his work,"I feel it is here, in Burnside's singular music".His first novel, The Dumb House, a chilling account of a man's psychopathic experiments on his own twin babies, was hailed by the New York Times as "strange and brilliant" and by the TLS for its "exceptional beauty". It came out in 1997, following the publication of his book of poems, Swimming in the Flood, the only one of his collections that's also teeming with dark images of murder, rape and children's corpses. Was this, I venture nervously, a particularly dark time for him?"Yeah," he says quietly, "it was a difficult time in my life.
