“I remember how, back in the 1980s, the Scottish Flow Country became an object of bemused controversy as rich celebrities and businessmen from south of the border acquired great tracts of this vast wetland in the far north in order to plant non-native conifer plantations that attract hefty tax breaks.”

Scottish writer

John Burnside was a Scottish writer, known for his poetry and for the recognition his work received in major literary prizes. He was one of four poets to win both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize for a single collection, Black Cat Bone, in 2011. In 2023, he received the David Cohen Prize for his body of work.