John Burnside has won the £40,000 (about $48,900) David Cohen Prize for Literature, sponsored by the John S. Cohen Foundation and New Writing North, which recognizes "a living writer from the U.K. or Republic of Ireland for a lifetime's achievement in literature."
Burnside is the author of 14 books of poetry, including Black Cat Bone, which won both the T.S. Eliot and the Forward Prizes in 2011 and, most recently, Ruin, Blossom, which will appear in April 2024. Among his prose works are the novels Glister and A Summer of Drowning, three memoirs, of which the most recent is I Put a Spell on You, and The Music of Time, a personal history of 20th century poetry, which was a Financial Times Book of the Year in 2019.
Organizers called Burnside "a poet, novelist, story-writer, memoirist, and essayist. He has been writing every imaginable kind of book--and some unimaginable kinds--for at least 35 years. He has an amazing literary range, he pours out a cornucopia of beautiful words, and he has won an array of distinguished prizes before this one. He casts a spell with language of great beauty, power, lyricism and truthfulness. There is much sorrow, pain, terror and violence lurking in his work: he is a strong and powerful writer about the dark places of the human mind--but he’s also funny and deeply humane. He has a resonant Northern quality, with his Scottish language and landscapes and people and ghosts, his strange, wild, dreamlike storytelling and his mysterious adventures in the far North. There's a deeply spiritual side to his work, but he's also in love with ordinary, the everyday, the earthbound. He's a writer who pays attention to the natural world with tenderness and care, even a kind of pagan religious intensity, and who makes us care about the things that matter to him."
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Sarah Bernstein won the C$100,000 (about US$72,465) Scotiabank Giller Prize, which recognizes the "author of the best Canadian novel, graphic novel or short story collection published in English," for her novel, Study for Obedience. Each of the remaining finalists receives C$10,000 (about US$7,245).
The jury said: "The modernist experiment continues to burn incandescently in Sarah Bernstein's slim novel, Study for Obedience. Bernstein asks the indelible question: what does a culture of subjugation, erasure, and dismissal of women produce? In this book, equal parts poisoned and sympathetic, Bernstein's unnamed protagonist goes about exacting, in shockingly twisted ways, the price of all that the world has withheld from her. The prose refracts Javier Marias sometimes, at other times Samuel Beckett. It's an unexpected and fanged book, and its own studied withholdings create a powerful mesmeric effect."
Elana Rabinovitch, executive director of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, commented: "Sincere congratulations to Sarah Bernstein on her win tonight. Study for Obedience is a ground-breaking, contemplative novel about victimhood and survival, a story told with unnerving precision by an author at the top of her game."
The winner will be honored with an in-person interview as part of the 2024 San Miguel Writer's Conference & Literary Festival, on February 22, 2024.