John Burnside

Professor in the School of English, John Burnside is an acclaimed writer of poetry, fiction, and memoir, and is a familiar name on literary shortlists, not least the Forward, TS Eliot, and Costa Prizes. As Tessa Hadley has said, he has a ‘lovely garrulousness all his own’, and it is with deftness and bite that he delves into the major philosophical and psychological quandaries of our age.

But in The Music of Time, John turns his eye to the past, and to the interactions of poetry and history. This is an epic survey that weaves through the personal and political, the joyous and the mournful. John will guide us from the Russian Revolution to the rise of consumerism, touching on writers and thinkers both renowned and unjustly obscure, in a stunning rendering of the twentieth century as recorded in the great literature of those who lived through it.