Faber & Faber

Gordon Burn, who has died at the age of 61, was the author of four novels including the Whitbread First Novel Prize-winning Alma Cogan and, most recently, Born Yesterday, as well as many works of non-fiction, including Happy Like Murderers and On the Way to Work with Damien Hirst. Fellow authors here pay tribute.

Val McDermid writes:

Every time I read something by Gordon Burn, I came away feeling that I’d learned something important about the way people make connections. Connections to each other, connections to history, connections to the way we live now. He once said about the Wests that he’d had three years of unparalleled access to the details of their lives and he still didn’t understand why they’d done what they did. But somehow, he helped his readers to forge an understanding.

As a journalist, I worked on the Yorkshire Ripper case. I talked to a lot of the same people Gordon spoke to when he was researching Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son. But I had to read the book before I felt any sense of illumination.

His work was as courageous as it was enlightening. The subjects he chose were awkward, uncomfortable, sometimes even taboo. Sutcliffe, the Wests, Myra Hindley - the obviously anathematised. But even with apparently cuddlier subjects like Paul McCartney and Tony Blair, his acute observation sliced and diced their public personae into something less savoury.

And as a lover of football, I was in awe of his unsentimental dissection of Manchester United’s doomed youths, Duncan Edwards and George Best. We once ate breakfast together in Edinburgh during the book festival, but we spoke of football, not literature. It was one of the more enjoyable chance literary encounters I’ve had.

In some ways, I felt his work was a mirror of my own interests - crime, football, popular music and politics. But I always felt he had a much surer grasp on what it all meant. I’m sad there won’t be more to come, but glad for what he has left behind. A masterclass in engagement with the society we live in.

Richard T. Kelly writes:

It’s a very hard thing to think that Gordon Burn is no longer with us. One of England’s foremost prose stylists, Gordon wrote so finely and insightfully on so many diverse subjects - the reader never quite sure on what topic his plenary mind would next alight - that one feels a sharp and singular sorrow knowing that we’ll not get any more of his brilliant books. So consummately did he tell the stories of two appalling serial murderers (Peter Sutcliffe and Fred West) that he was sometimes labelled a 'True Crime' specialist. ‘I slightly bridle’, he told me, ‘because the implication is that you’re some nutter who’s obsessed with violence. I’m not at all.’ Indeed he wasn't.

When I spoke to Gordon last summer for an essay I was writing about the literature of the North East, he offered me an amused and amusing list of ‘the qualities - good and bad - that we have come to associate with the North East: hard-grafting, plain-spoken, open, canny, dogged, leftish, laddish, nostalgic, sentimental, chippy, suffering fools not at all, happy to appear dafter / less genned-up than one is, built-in bullshit-detector on permanent full alert ...’

Needless to say, I think that was not a bad summary of Gordon’s own personal qualities, aside from his writerly gifts. I will always remember interviewing him and David Peace for Esquire in April 2008, beneath the pearl-strung chandeliers of an incongruously posh restaurant serving a French menu devised by a Japanese chef. Within minutes of our being seated, Gordon, looking just a bit twinkly, let it be known he would have much preferred a pie and a pint in the pub down the road. [read in full]

Liam McIlvanney writes:

There are very few writers whose books provoke, not pleasure, merely, or admiration, but flat-out excitement. For me, Gordon Burn was such a writer. I read Alma Cogan when it came out, and I was staggered by the book’s audacity and eloquence, its fusion of relevance and style. In novels like Alma Cogan and Born Yesterday, Gordon Burn extended our sense of what the novel can do. He was our DeLillo and, sentence for sentence, he was often better than DeLillo. He did have great originality and formal adventurousness and the most gimlet of eyes for contemporary Britain, but for me what he had above all was a glorious command of the sentence. That's what I will miss: Gordon Burn's sentences.

I don't know if many writers do this, but I have a bookshelf for writers that I read when I'm trying to write. These are writers whose books you take down while you're working, in the hope that they will help you make your sentences as good as you can make them. In my own case, this shelf accommodates a pretty disparate crew - there's Graham Greene, Robert Louis Stevenson, Raymond Chandler and others. But there’s also Gordon Burn. In the course of writing All the Colours of the Town I must have read Fullalove three times. It's a brilliantly incisive, intelligent book, but it's also one that you can read the way you read Wodehouse - for the sheer pure pleasure of the language.

Over the past couple of years, I got to know Gordon Burn a little - he was writing something for a book of essays I’m co-editing - and I feel lucky that I did. I never met him, but I relished his stylish, helpful, humorous messages during our email exchanges. He also knew I was finishing a novel of my own, and his support and encouragement mattered hugely to me. I owe a large personal debt to Gordon Burn, but I’m not alone in this. A whole slew of younger British writers - among them David Peace, Andrew O'Hagan and Richard T. Kelly - have been energised and schooled by Burn's enormous innovations and achievements. As readers and writers of British fiction we all owe a debt to Gordon Burn. He was one of the great British writers of our time.

Lee Brackstone, Faber Editorial Director, writes:

I have been lucky enough to work with Gordon over the course of the past dozen years. I was introduced to his work late, in my early 20s, via Happy Like Murderers, his nightmarish book on the Wests, a book which somehow - fearlessly and unflinchingly - attempted to navigate the narrative of motive, cause and effect surrounding a case that traumatised Britain in the 90s.

Gordon's subject of choice was often trauma, spectacle and dysfunction. He was drawn to the dark side of celebrity (or, the celebration and anatomy of decadence) and his literature and impulse always represented to me an attempt to find comfort, meaning and compassion in the most appalling or baffling of events. The disappearance of Madeleine McCann, the tragic loss of Duncan Edwards, the haunting spectre-like presence of Myra Hindley over the late 20th century, the primacy - the 'necessary-ness' as Gordon himself might put it, of his great friend Damien Hirst's art: all of this was connected in his mind. And so it should be. And so, uniquely, he articulated what all of this suggested about the culture today, and about us.

Gordon was uniquely placed to make sympathetic, brave and sometimes downright obscure and provocative parallels between the worlds of sport, art, literature, entertainment and politics. Being with him was like mining at the cultural coalface with a toothpick - as a native Geordie, I hope he'd appreciate that, as much as I hope he'll forgive my rushed and inadequate prose.

But I found increasingly that Gordon's vision, his interception and interpretation of what our culture has become (vain, debased, crying out for help, for security, for relevance) was far ahead of the rest of the literary world. Quite often it was way ahead of me. I wish I'd had the chance to talk to him about the Wacko-Circus; he'd have anticipated the sad and perverse hysteria of the deification and made a kind of sense of it. I don't really feel Gordon's literary peers ever fully made sense of his genius; neither do I feel he received the accolades his fiction, non-fiction prose and work as an art critic deserved. 

Born Yesterday, his visionary novel which documents the summer of 2007, when not only Madeleine, but Tony Blair 'disappeared', will endure, perhaps as the best example of what Gordon aspired to in his fiction: a total reinvention of genre, form, method, and composition. A book, he proposed to me, he would write 'in real time' and which would document these times in the form of 'The News as a Novel'.

Having worked as a journalist with a sharp eye for a story in the 70s Gordon understood, questioned and celebrated, more than any of his peers, the advent of 24-hour news on loop; the pornographic, compulsive intensity of it. Almost as a living and reflective literary version of that summer, Gordon attempted what was effectively the fictionalised version of an art-installation. Increasingly he was interested in collage, in the spaces in-between events (Edwards dying; Best killing himself) and people (Thatcher walking her dogs in Battersea Park; Blair sliding off into well-renumerated 'retirement').

Born Yesterday, to me, represented an experiment as brave as anything attempted by Pound, BS Johnson, or Foster Wallace. More influenced by his beloved (and beloved -of-him) first generation YBAs (Hirst, Emin, Lucas etc) than any literary antecedent, the novel was rightly and intelligently praised. A part of me (not to be too Burn-aggrandising) always felt it captured the essence of that year in the same way as The Waste Land did 1922. I know this is a big statement (and comparison) for a figure at Faber to make but Born Yesterday was a bravura Modernist moment and as an art-record of Blair's annus horribilis it will remain compelling, vital, and ambiguous well into the coming decades.

I'll remember Gordon as a man who made me laugh. At the world, but mostly at myself. I'll also remember him as someone who loved people, friendship, the good times. Someone who was constantly intellectually restless and yet absolutely fulfilled at home in Chelsea (a Geordie in Chelsea, I ask you!) with Carol, his wife, and his dog. A beautiful bag of contradictions. I'll remember a writer who acknowledged it was the world and events that shaped his art (so often it's the reverse) and a man who saw-through the bullshit to find ballast in those moments when we feel most lacking in gravity.

Mostly, I'll miss him. And I'll miss the books he won't write. We have lost one of the great literary innovators of these times; a writer, I think, as crucial to our understanding of ourselves as De Lillo is to American culture. He'd blanche at these comparisons of course ... And yet secretly, love them.