New research into the Foundation’s archive of literary manuscripts has uncovered a number of previously unknown poems and songs by Anthony Burgess. To celebrate the 104th anniversary of Burgess’s birth on 25 February 2021, and the US publication of Collected Poems on the same date, we are presenting one of the new poems here. ‘A […]
2021 marks the 50th anniversary of the first release of Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of A Clockwork Orange and 60 years since Anthony Burgess completed his most famous novel. To celebrate the anniversary, we present an online series called The Clockwork Collection, with a focus on A Clockwork Orange. Each month, we’ll be sharing a […]
In our latest article for the Inside The Archive blog series, we consider the extensive collection of poems by Anthony Burgess in the Manchester archive. Anthony Burgess never lost his early passion for poetry and continued to experiment and engage with this literary form throughout his career. In the new edition of Burgess’s Collected Poems […]
Raymond Yiu is a composer who first discovered the work of Anthony Burgess in the 1990s when he picked up a copy of This Man and Music in a second-hand bookshop. This led to a fascination with Burgess’s writing and music, which eventually inspired Raymond to compose The World Was Once All Miracle, an orchestral […]
In 2020, the Burgess Foundation was on the point of launching a new archive volunteer programme. The closure of our building due to the pandemic meant that we had to suspend all on-site activities. We explored options for working remotely with volunteers and, by October, we were ready to begin a remote transcription project with […]
One of Anthony Burgess’s first commissions from Penguin Books was to write an introduction to Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, published in 1966 as part of the Penguin English Library. His introduction is still available in the current Penguin Classics edition, and it remains a lively and thoughtful preparation for Defoe’s haunting […]
Nicholas Rankin is a writer and broadcaster who first discovered the work of Anthony Burgess when he was a student in the late 1960s. Burgess would go on to inform Rankin’s later writing, and he appears in his recent history of wartime Gibraltar, Defending the Rock: How Gibraltar Defeated Hitler. Nicholas has agreed to take […]
2021 marks the 50th anniversary of the first release of Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of A Clockwork Orange, and 60 years since Anthony Burgess completed his most famous novel. To celebrate the anniversary we are launching a new online series, with a focus on A Clockwork Orange. Each month, we’ll be sharing a highlight from […]
We’re thrilled to announce that a catalogue to over two thirds of our book collection is now searchable for free on Jisc Library Hub Discover. This is the first time that a catalogue to our library has been made available online and it marks a significant step forward in terms of increasing access to our […]
Clockwork Controversy: Myth: Anthony Burgess wrote A Clockwork Orange in only three weeks. Fact: Burgess composed his novel over a period of more than 18 months, during which time he visited Russia, devised a new slang, and crafted the book very carefully. It is a complex and intricate work, which continues to be read all […]