The Ultimate Burns Supper Book

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Second Edition publishing November 2024.

About the Book: 

Everything you need to enjoy or arrange a Burns Supper – just add food, drink and friends.

Clark McGinn, one of the foremost Burns Supper speakers in the world, presents The Ultimate Burns Supper Book. Containing all the information you need to enjoy a Supper, whether as host, speaker or guest, this book is full of advice, anecdotes, poetry and wit.

Robert Burns is one of Scotland’s greatest gifts to civilisation (along with whisky) and his poetry is rightly celebrated across the globe.

The odds are you’ll be invited to a Supper at some point in your life and you may even want to host a Supper of your own. Whatever the case, this book will provide you with all the information you need to have great fun at every Burns Supper as guest or host.

• A complete run through of what to expect on the night, with a list of courses and speeches.
• Advice on what to wear.
• A section on how to prepare and present speeches.
• A list of common Burns Supper questions (and their answers!)
• A selection of Burns’s greatest poems, including a full English verse translation of the ‘Address to a Haggis’.
• Answers your concerns about eating haggis and extols the pleasures of drinking whisky

Reviews: 

This is the best, the clearest, the sharpest, the only guide you will ever need. PROFESSOR MURRAY PITTOCK

A genial book that stresses the fun to be had rather than the rules to be followed… exudes bonhomie and offers practical suggestions and quirky factoids. SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY

Mixes humour with some serious work on Burns. FINANCIAL TIMES

About the Author:

CLARK McGINN was born and brought up in Ayr, being educated at Ayr Academy where he spoke at his first Burns Supper. He has performed at over 200 Immortal Memory speeches in 32 cities in 17 countries, travelling nearly a dozen times round the globe in the process. He was President of the Burns Club of London during the Burns 250th Celebrations in 2009, when he gave the Eulogy at the National Service of Thanksgiving for Burns at Westminster Abbey. In 2014, he was awarded a PhD by the University of Glasgow for his research into the history of the Burns Supper and has had several peer-reviewed articles published on various aspects of Burns. 

He has published several books on the Burns Supper, including The Ultimate Burns Supper Book, The Burns Supper: A Comprehensive History and The Burns Supper: A Concise History. Clark lives with his wife, Ann, in Harrow-on-the-Hill and Fowey. Their three daughters live outside London and New York.