About the Artist
MJ Burns is a writer and artist from the North East of Scotland. Their passion is for storytelling of any kind and they have training and experience in many different forms.
They are a published short story writer in a number of literary magazines, including Gutter. They were shortlisted for the Edinburgh Award for Flash Fiction in 2024, and in 2023 they were shortlisted for the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival writing competition, and longlisted for the Emerging Writer Award 2023 for their novel work-in-progress.
They are former Assistant Editor and columnist for Shoreline of Infinity, and in 2018 their article series about early Scottish science fiction was longlisted for the British Science Fiction Association award for Non Fiction.
(This project is now part of Shoreline of Infinity's online offshoot: www.sfcaledonia.scot)
MJ also holds Masters degrees in Creative Writing (University of Aberdeen) and Comics & Graphic Novels (University of Dundee). Their undergraduate was English Literature at the University of St Andrews.
They have written and drawn for short commissioned comics, but their main focus is developing their main project -- adapting, writing and illustrating a graphic novel of the Scottish classic novel by James Hogg, 'The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner'.
For this project, they were awarded a place on the 2023 Interdisciplinary Residency at Hospitalfield; a short segment is published in the University of Dundee's 2021 edition of the novel; also soon they will be exhibiting work in progress in a public exhibition in Selkirk to mark the novel's anniversary.
They are undertaking the work of adapting, writing, and drawing for the graphic novel alongside their full-time 9-5pm job. They are in constant pursuit of funding to get time to work on this project as they are passionate about getting A Justified Sinner out there in the world.