Richard Weston Burgin (June 30, 1947 – October 22, 2020) was an American fiction writer, editor, composer, critic, and academic.
His first published book was a collection of interviews he conducted with the Latin American writer, Jorge Luis Borges, while Burgin was still an undergraduate.
Writing in the Daily Beast/Newsweek, Joyce Carol Oates said, "What Edgar Allan Poe did for the psychotic soul, Richard Burgin does for the deeply neurotic who pass among us disguised as so seemingly 'normal,' we may mistake them for ourselves.
"[4] In an interview published in the literary journal Pleiades, Burgin said, "My goal is and always has been to depict people as honestly as I know them, which means writing about their mistakes as well as their victories, their fear as well as their courage (the two are always mixed), their cruelty or selfishness as well as their kindness.
The anthology L'Ecume des Flammes, a Richard Burgin Reader, was published in February 2011 (in French) by 13e Note Editions.
Reviewing the book in Le Monde, critic Florence Noiville wrote, "There is something electrifying, even addictive, in the writing of Richard Burgin."
In an interview for the book Creating Fiction: A Writer's Companion (Harcourt Brace, 1995) Burgin said, "At Boulevard we're open to different styles of writing.
On October 22, 2020, Burgin died in his sleep at his home in Clayton, Missouri, after a long battle with Parkinson's disease.