Burnside (born 19 March 1955) is a Scottish writer, born in DBurnside studied English and European Languages at Cambridge College of Arts and T A former computer software engineer, he has been a freelance writer since He is a former Writer in Residence at the University of Dundee and is now Reader in Creative Writing at St Andrews U His first collection of poetry, The Hoop, was published in 1988 and won a Scottish Arts Council Book A Other poetry collections include Common Knowledge (1991), Feast Days (1992), winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and The Asylum Dance (2000), winner of the Whitbread Poetry Award and shortlisted for both the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) and the T S Eliot P The Light Trap (2001) was also shortlisted for the T S Eliot PBurnside is also the author of a collection of short stories, Burning Elvis (2000), and several novels, including The Dumb House (1997), The Mercy Boys (1999) (winner of the Encore Award) and The Locust Room (2001), which is set in Cambridge in 1975, and explores the consequences of a series of violent His poetry collection, The Good Neighbour (2005), was shortlisted for the 2005 Forward Poetry Prize (Best Collection) He also occasionally writes a column for The Guardian Burnside was one of the judges for the 2007 Griffin Poetry P[edit] Literary WorksPoetryThe Broon Hoop (Carcanet, 1988) Common Knowledge (Secker and Warburg, London, 1991) Feast Days (Secker and Warburg, London, 1992) The Myth of the Twin (Jonathan Cape, London, 1995) Swimming in the Flood (Jonathan Cape, London, 1995) Penguin Modern Poets (Penguin, 1996) A Normal Skin (Jonathan Cape, London, 1997) The Asylum Dance (Jonathan Cape, London, 2000) The Light Trap (Jonathan Cape, London, 2002) The Good Neighbour (Jonathan Cape, 2005) Selected Poems (2006) "Gift Songs" [2007] "The Hunt in the Forest" [forthcoming 2009]FictionThe Dumb House (Jonathan Cape, London, 1997) The Mercy Boys (Jonathan Cape, London, 1999) Burning Elvis (Jonathan Cape, London, 2000) The Locust Room (Jonathan Cape, London, 2001) Living Nowhere (Jonathan Cape, London, 2003) The Devil's Footprints (Jonathan Cape, 2007) Glister (Jonathan Cape, 2008) Non-FictionA Lie About My Father (2006) Wallace Stevens: poet to poet - FaberScreenDice (with A L Kennedy), a series for television, produced by Cité-Amérique, Canada OtherWild Reckoning (Gulbenkian, 2004), joint editor with Maurice Riordan of this anthology of ecology-related poems