The audio archive at the Burgess Foundation comprises 1,094 cassettes and 87 reel-to-reel tapes. The recordings run to over a thousand hours, and include interviews with the media, public lectures, private telephone conversations, piano playing and poetry reading at home, domestic discussions, and sometimes street noises and birdsong. Other tapes contain classical music, obscure radio programmes, […]

The audio collections at the Burgess Foundation contain several recordings of Burgess reading his own work, extracts from his novels, or lectures recorded by Liana. It is unusual to find him reading the work of other writers. A recent discovery is a tape of Burgess reading A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, in which he […]

This recording of Anthony Burgess reading Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem ‘Pied Beauty’ is part of Burgess’s private audio collection. It was originally part of a larger recording intended to accompany Burgess’s book They Wrote In English (1979), written for Italian student of English Literature. The recording fell out of circulation shortly after it was produced. […]

The sound archives at the Burgess Foundation contain thousands of hours of recordings, including Burgess playing music, practicing lectures, reading from his own works, and speaking in public. This audio extract is from a series of lectures Burgess gave at City College in New York about Shakespeare and his peers. This recording was made on […]