Brian Burland

After his death Burland's family donated a collection of his original manuscripts, unpublished novels, poems, journals, correspondence and paintings, for educational use to Bermuda College, where on 9 May 2013 the Brian Burland Centre for Research was formally opened. Dedicated to preserving and promoting his works and as well as to encouraging aspiring Bermudian writers, the Centre features a specially commissioned mural by leading Bermudian artist Graham Foster that depicts imagery from four Burland novels: The Sailor and the Fox, Flight of the Cavalier, A Fall From Aloft, and Stephen Decatur, the Devil and the Endymion.

Burland suffered from Huntington's disease in his later life and spent his last years at Westmeath Nursing Home and finally at Sylvia Richardson Care Facility. He died on 11 February 2010 at the age of 78. He was buried on 16 February 2010 at St. Paul's Church, Paget, following a Baháʼí memorial service at the church hall.

In 2001, the Bermudian government's Department of Community and Cultural Affairs established the Bermuda Literary Awards, and Burland won the Founder's Award and the prize for Children's and Young Adult Fiction. In 2007, the fiction award was renamed the Brian Burland Prize for Fiction.

In 1994 he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Bermuda Arts Council.

Burland's novels were generally well reviewed in publications including The Observer, The Times Literary Supplement, The Spectator, The Times in London, the New Statesman and The New York Times, being praised by the likes of novelist Anthony Burgess, playwright David Rabe and actor Sir Ralph Richardson. In response to one rare, particularly negative review, Burland wrote a letter to The New York Times in July 1986, taking the reviewer to task:

It was not until 1964, however, that Burland began to be published, with his first book, St. Nicholas in the Tub, being produced in the US. His next novel, A Fall From Aloft, was published in the United Kingdom in 1968, followed by A Few Flowers for St. George (1970), Undertow (1961) and in 1973, The Sailor and the Fox. Burland's other published novels are Surprise (1975), Stephen Decatur, the Devil and the Endymion (1975), Flight of the Cavalier (1980) and Love is a Durable Fire (1985). His papers include the manuscripts of five as yet unpublished novels.

On the death of his father in 1951 Burland returned to Bermuda and worked in the family construction company for five years. During this time he played with a black cricket team, "which raised eyebrows from blacks and whites... and gave him material for his novels." In 1956 he sold his interest in the company, and, aged 26, went to Jamaica. There he met Noël Coward, who was impressed with a short story of Burland's.

Burland was married and divorced three times: to Charlotte Ann “Gale” Burland (with whom he had three children: Susan, Anne and William), to Edwina Trentham (mother of his son Benjamin) and finally to Ishbel Gibb Lee. He was the first Bermudian to become a Bahá'í, in 1949, and said: "It's been an inspiration for all my writing and painting; it's a connection with a higher power."

Burland began his education at Saltus Grammar School in Hamilton, Bermuda, before being sent to England in 1944 as a boarder to Aldenham School in Hertfordshire. His experiences on the ship crossing the Atlantic crossing during World War II would be evoked in his early novel A Fall from Aloft (1968). Burland subsequently attended the University of Western Ontario in Canada, where he took a graduate English course, but dropped out without graduating. Travelling to Ireland, he began working on his first novel.

Brian Burland (23 April 1931 – 11 February 2010) was a Bermudian writer, who was the author of nine acclaimed novels that typically dealt with colonialism, family strife and race. He was also a published poet. Burland was the first Bermudian novelist to receive international acclaim.

Brian Berkeley Burland was born in Bermuda in 1931, to Gordon Burland and his wife Honor (née Gosling), and was one of four siblings. His was a privileged family background, but from an early age Brian was very conscious of Bermuda's racial inequalities and empathised with black Bermudians: "An important figure in his early life was Sarah Hinson, his black Bermudian nanny who... appears in his novel The Flight of the Cavalier as a heroic figure. Burland's family honoured his request to be buried next to her at St. Paul's Church, Paget."