Childhood

Judges' comments

Shannon Burns’s Childhood is a remarkably accomplished memoir recounting the neglect and trauma the author experienced as a child — adrift and powerless in an unstable world of arguments, alcohol, poverty and violence — and his eventual escape into, and through, literature. Written in a dispassionate style that expertly blends first and third person narration, Childhood eschews the temptations of self-pity or sentimentality, while gradually accumulating a deeply moving power.

The honesty that underpins Burns’s writing is unflinching when directed at the many adults who failed him so atrociously in his youth, but also to his own youthful self. It is Burns’s ability to steadfastly confront and interrogate, as an adult, the most painful moments of his childhood that is one of the many reasons this book is exceptional. The memoir begins with an epigraph from Tolstoy which becomes bitterly ironic in the context of what is to follow, 'The happy, happy unrecoverable days of childhood!' While Burns’s childhood days were the furthest thing possible from happy, he has succeeded brilliantly in recovering them through his art.