In 1984, Anthony Burgess published Ninety-Nine Novels, a selection of his favourite novels in English since 1939. The list is typically idiosyncratic, and shows the breadth of Burgess’s interest in fiction. This podcast, by the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, explores the novels on Burgess’s list with the help of writers, critics and other special guests. […]
Anthony Burgess wrote this essay for the New York Times in 1970, the year in which his Shakespeare biography was published. After completing a lecture tour of Europe and the United States, he was teaching at Princeton University. I’ve spent the last couple of years, off and on, in two worlds simultaneously — imaginatively in […]
In this episode of the Burgess Foundation Podcast, Andrew Biswell explores The Devil Prefers Mozart, a new collection of Anthony Burgess’s essays on music, with the book’s editor, Paul Phillips. The Devil Prefers Mozart: On Music and Musicians, covers classical, modern and operatic works, as well as jazz, pop, heavy metal and punk. This episode […]
In this episode of the Burgess Foundation Podcast, Andrew Biswell talks to the writer and publisher Richard Cohen about his memories of working with Anthony Burgess in the 1980s. Richard Cohen is the former publishing director of Hutchinson, and was instrumental in publishing some of Burgess’s best known novels of the 1980s, beginning with The […]
A new selection of Burgess’s essays about music will be published on 25 January. Music surrounded Burgess throughout his early years in Manchester. He came from a family of musicians: his mother had been a music-hall singer, and his father played piano in pubs, music halls and silent cinemas. In his book about music and […]
Anthony Burgess died in London on 22 November 1993. He was 76 years old and had been diagnosed with lung cancer just over a year previously. The final phase of his life was characterised by intense creative production, in a variety of forms. The publication of a long novel about the rediscovery of the sword […]
Burgess wrote this foreword to The Wanting Seed in 1982. The novel has recently appeared in Bulgarian and French. A new English edition has just been published in the Penguin Essentials collection. The Wanting Seed appeared in the autumn of 1962, with A Clockwork Orange, my other piece of futfic or future-fiction, pairing it in […]
In this episode of the Burgess Foundation podcast, Andrew Biswell of the Burgess Foundation explores fictional representations of Jesus Christ with writer Nicholas Graham, author of The Judas Case. We begin with Anthony Burgess’s 1979 novel, Man of Nazareth, an ambitious account of Jesus’s life from the point of view of a fictional Greek merchant. […]
Manchester Literature Festival and Manchester UNESCO City of Literature are delighted to appoint Peter Bakowski and Jake Goldwasser as the Virtual Writers in Residence for the second Festival of Libraries. Following in the digital foot-steps of 2021 writers Alicia Sometimes and Anna Polonyi, Melbourne poet Peter Bakowski will be hosted by the International Anthony Burgess […]
This episode of the Burgess Foundation Podcast is the first in an occasional series in which we speak to the current translators of Anthony Burgess’s novels to find out the delights and challenges involved in making them understandable in different languages and cultures. Our first guest in this series is Ludger Tolksdorf, who has spent […]