Gordon Burn

Burn's novels explore the issues of modern fame and faded celebrity as lived through the media spotlight. His novel Alma Cogan (1991), which imagined the future life of the British singer Alma Cogan had she not died in 1966, won the Whitbread Award for Best First Novel. His other novels, Fullalove and The North of England Home Service, were published in 1995 and 2003, respectively.

His non-fiction works deal primarily with sport and true crime. Burn's first book, Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son, was a study of Peter Sutcliffe, 'the Yorkshire Ripper,' and his 1998 book, Happy Like Murderers: The Story of Fred and Rosemary West, dealt in similar detail with two of Britain's most notorious serial killers.

Burn's interest in such infamous villains extended to his fiction, with Myra Hindley, one of the 'Moors murderers', featuring prominently in the novel Alma Cogan. His sport-based books consisted of Pocket Money: Inside the World of Snooker (1986) and Best and Edwards: Football, Fame and Oblivion (2006), the latter of which examines the twin stories of Manchester United footballers Duncan Edwards and George Best, and the "trajectory of two careers unmoored in wildly different ways."

He also wrote a book in conjunction with British artist Damien Hirst, On the Way to Work, a collection of interviews from various dates between 1992 and 2001. A regular contributor to The Guardian, his columns often focused on contemporary art.

Gordon Burn died of bowel cancer in 2009, aged 61.

Sex & Violence, Death & Silence is a book written by Gordon Burn in 2009 and published by Faber and Faber. It contains selections of writing by Burn about art and artists (as well as art dealers and collectors) spanning almost thirty-five years, including interviews and reviews as well as extracts from his novel Alma Cogan. It opens with a foreword by Damien Hirst with David Peace.

Gordon Burn died in the summer of 2009, whilst the book was being prepared for publication.

The artists discussed in the book are as follows:

British art dealer Nigel Greenwood is also featured.

Critical reception

Nicholas Lezard described the work as being "knowledgeable, thorough and readable".

Fiction

• Alma Cogan (1991)
• Fullalove (1995)
• The North of England Home Service (2003)
• Born Yesterday: The News As A Novel (2008)

Non-fiction

• Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son: The Story of Peter Sutcliffe (1984)
• Pocket Money: Inside The World of Snooker (1986)
• Happy Like Murderers: The Story of Fred And Rosemary West (1998)
• On The Way To Work (with Damien Hirst) (2001)
• Best And Edwards: Football, Fame And Oblivion (2006)

In 2013 the Gordon Burn Prize was launched "to reward fiction or non-fiction written in the English language, which in the opinion of the judges most successfully represents the spirit and sensibility of Gordon's literary methods: novels which dare to enter history and interrogate the past...literature which challenges perceived notions of genre and makes us think again about just what it is that we are reading."

The prize is jointly organised by the Gordon Burn Trust, New Writing North and Faber & Faber. The winner receives £5,000 and is offered the use of Burn's cottage in Berwickshire as a writers' retreat. Up until 2024, the prize ceremony was generally the first event of the Durham Book Festival. In 2024, the prize fund was doubled to £10,000 due to new sponsors and the award ceremony relocated to Newcastle upon Tyne.

Shortlists and Winners