John Burnside: As freedom is a breakfastfood: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Haplessness

John Burnside is poet, novelist and academic. He is one of only three poets (the others being Ted Hughes and Sean O'Brien) to have won both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize for the same book (Black Cat Bone). He is also the author of two collections of short stories, Burning Elvis (2000), and Something Like Happy (2013), as well as several novels, including The Dumb House (1997), The Devil's Footprints, (2007), Glister, (2009) and A Summer of Drowning, (2011). His multi-award winning memoir, A Lie About My Father, was published in 2006 and its successor Waking Up In Toytown, in 2010. A further memoir, I Put A Spell On You combined personal history with reflections on romantic love, magic and popular music. His short stories and feature essays have appeared in numerous magazines and journals, including The New Yorker, The Guardian and The London Review of Books, among others. He also writes an occasional nature column for New Statesman. In 2011 he received the Petrarca-Preis, a major German international literary prize.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (elected in 1999) and in March 2016 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland's National Academy for science and letters.

This video was filmed live at the Alpine Fellowship 2022 Symposium in partnership with Bard College through the Open Society University Network and supported in part by a grant from the Open Society Foundations.