Never performed or heard in the UK, Burgess’s Oedipus the King is a robust and powerful version of Sophocles’s classic text. The drama includes an invented language that Burgess created especially for the 1972 production of the piece at the Tyrone Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, USA. This has been preserved in the International Anthony Burgess […]

Anthony Burgess had a close relationship with classical music – not only did it influence his novels, but he also wrote his own music. On the centenary of his birth, Burgess’s biographer and director of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Andrew Biswell, presents music that inspired him, including pieces by Beethoven, Walton and Constant Lambert. […]

Five writers, some of whom knew him in person, explore Burgess’s life and reflect on their favourite Burgess works, exploring the extraordinary twentieth-century man of letters from different angles. The Essay: Burgess at 100 offers personal as well as critical insight into why he remains a literary figure of such importance. These essays look beyond […]

It is now 100 years since the birth, in Manchester, of a boy christened John Burgess Wilson, who at his confirmation into the Roman Catholic Church took the name of Anthony, patron saint of lost objects. About forty years later, he began to be modestly well known under the nom de plume of ‘Anthony Burgess’ […]

One of my favourite authors, the delightfully chaotic Anthony Burgess, bought a splendid old house in Lija, the village next to ours. With his lively second wife and their small son, he had now moved to Malta where, like me, he was enjoying the escape from city pressure. But there was one big difference between […]

Anthony Burgess is the greatest of Manchester’s writers, and if he possesses all our virtues, he more than shares our vices. A Mancunian who has made a splash in the arts or letters is automatically a public intellectual, at least in their own head. There is a loud, ostentatious intelligence to the city’s writers that […]

ONE: He wrote books under three different names. Born John Burgess Wilson in 1917, he adopted the pen-name ‘Anthony Burgess’ in 1956, when he published his first novel, Time for a Tiger. He also published two books as Joseph Kell, and a volume of literary history as John Burgess Wilson. He wanted to publish his […]

Knowing of his love for and great knowledge of music, I interviewed Anthony in 1968 for one of the first BBC films I ever made, All My Loving, which was essentially about ‘pop music’ and all that that entailed in the late 1960s. The Monterey Festival was behind us, and Woodstock still to come. But […]

In 1980 Anthony Burgess spent a week at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, delivering the John Crowe Ransom Memorial Lectures. As Editor of The Kenyon Review at that time, I spent a good deal of time talking with Anthony, but there are two stories that should be preserved. One afternoon at lunch, we were discussing […]

In 1974, when I was a Senior Lecturer in the English Department at Birmingham University, pursuing a twin career as novelist and critic, I was invited by the British Council to do what they called a ‘Specialist Tour’ in  Italy, giving lectures at several universities. My itinerary began in Naples and ended in Milan, with […]