The Gordon Burn Prize is given each year in October. The prize is a partnership between the Gordon Burn Trust, New Writing North and Faber & Faber. The winning writer will receive a cheque for £5,000 and be offered the opportunity to undertake a writing retreat of up to three months at Gordon Burn’s cottage in Berwickshire in the Scottish Borders area of Scotland.

Gordon Burn was a writer for whom no subject or character was beyond fictionalising. Peter Sutcliffe, Alma Cogan, Duncan Edwards, George Best and Bobby Charlton, Damien Hirst, Gordon Brown, Margaret Thatcher, and even Gordon Burn himself: Burn loved to take characters already burnished in the celebrity spotlight and explore the darkness beneath. Sometimes he would choose fiction to do this, as in his Whitbread Prize-winning debut, Alma Cogan; other times – and sometimes within the same book – his methods and intentions were more ambiguous. The reader begins to question the very nature of what he is reading. Fiction? Non-fiction? Faction? Or, as celebrated by the likes of Norman Mailer in the late Sixties, the non-fiction novel.

Gordon Burn belonged, and felt himself to belong, to an American tradition born in the High Sixties. A lover of Capote, Mailer and New Journalism, in his career as a writer, Gordon applied the rigour and tenacity of a reporter and journalist to what was often a fictional template. He loved novels like DeLillo's Libra (a fictional telling of the Lee Harvey Oswald story) and carved out a unique place for himself in contemporary British writing, often responding to real, spectacular, sometimes appalling events.

The Gordon Burn Prize seeks to reward a published title (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; writers of non-fiction brave enough to recast characters and historical events to create a new and vivid reality. Literature which challenges perceived notions of genre and makes us think again about just what it is that we are reading.

The winner of the Gordon Burn Prize 2022 will be announced at Durham Book Festival on Thursday 13 October 2022. 

The prize will reward literature which challenges perceived notions of genre and makes us think again about just what it is that we are reading