Throughout 2020, the International Anthony Burgess Foundation is celebrating the fortieth anniversary of Earthly Powers, Burgess’s longest and most accomplished novel. We have already launched a dedicated Earthly Powers micro-site and are looking forward to future meetings of the Earthly Powers reading group. We invite you to listen to our series of podcasts themed around Earthly Powers, in which […]
Perfect? Masterly? Sub-literary and contrived? We look at Anthony Burgess’s love-hate relationship with F. Scott Fitzgerald. 2020 marks the hundredth anniversary of the publication of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s debut novel, This Side of Paradise, and eighty years since his death in 1940 at the age of 44. He is among the authors who Burgess found […]
Not every project realises its full potential, and documents in the Burgess archive point towards a film project which, like its subject, faced a premature end. In December 1968, Burgess received a letter from his literary agent Deborah Rogers, with an update on incoming correspondence. Burgess had left England in October to begin a new life […]
We look at the shorter pieces for piano written by Anthony Burgess, including the rather lively ‘Hornpipe’ Anthony Burgess’s ‘Hornpipe’ is an undated short piece for solo piano. Possibly part of an untitled set of six keyboard works, including three fugues, an air, and a passacaglia, its lively and simple melody is based on a […]
We reveal a gruesome inspiration behind Anthony Burgess’s novel Earthly Powers: the Jonestown suicide cult leader Jim Jones. One of the pivotal events in Earthly Powers is the establishment and violent dissolution of Godfrey Manning’s religious cult, known as the ‘Children of God’. Although this cult seems to be well ingrained in the narrative of […]
The Observer / Burgess Prize for Arts Journalism is now open for entries. Our annual review writing competition has a prize fund of £4,000 and an opportunity to be published in the Observer newspaper. Anthony Burgess wrote hundreds of articles for many publications, including the Times Literary Supplement, the Spectator and the Yorkshire Post, which […]
Our Inside The Archive blog series casts new light onto the Burgess Foundation’s collections. In this post, we take a leaf from Anthony Burgess’s notebooks. Fourteen of Anthony Burgess’s diaries and notebooks survive in the collections at the Burgess Foundation, containing fragmentary but intriguing manuscript material dating from 1940 to 1977. Burgess was not an […]
Anthony Burgess Earthly Powers is full of literary figures, with perhaps the most notable cameo being James Joyce. On Bloomsday, we examine this most famous novelist inside a novel. Earthly Powers is full of fictional representations of writers. The protagonist Kenneth Toomey takes up with invented poets (Val Wrigley, Roger Pembroke), discovers the novels of […]
10 June 2020 is the fiftieth anniversary of Burgess’s famous lecture, ‘Obscenity and the Arts’, which was delivered to a large audience at the University of Malta in Valletta. In this blog, we look back on the story of Burgess’s lecture and the events which provoked it. In November 1968, Burgess and his new […]
When Anthony Burgess moved to Malaya, he needed to learn the language. Take a look at the books that helped his studies, and find out how we’re preserving those books. On 5 August 1954, Burgess set sail from Southampton with his first wife, Lynne, and their cat, Lalage, ready to begin a new life as […]