One of the highlights of the 2017 Manchester International Festival will be a new artists’ film, based on two of Anthony Burgess’s Enderby novels, which will be screened as part of an exhibition at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester between 30 June and 16 July. Details of this free exhibition are available here. The […]
Chatsky, or The Importance of Being Stupid is Burgess’s translation of Alexander Sergeyevich Griboyedov’s play Gore ot Uma (Woe Out of Wit), and is one of the last pieces of work he undertook. Burgess completed the translation around Easter 1991, but would have to wait until 11 March 1993 for it to be performed […]
The Centenary of Anthony Burgess’s birth has inspired many commemorations around the world, especially in the place he lived. Monaco is celebrating its connection with Burgess with a new commemorative stamp. Monaco was Burgess’s home from 1975 to 1993, a relatively settled period of his life in which he lived with his wife Liana and […]
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 […]
Anthony Burgess was nominated for a Grammy in 1974 for his work on the musical version of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac. He shared the honour with his collaborator Michael J Lewis, a Welsh composer of music for film and theatre. Burgess was originally commissioned to translate Cyrano de Bergerac by the Tyrone Guthrie Theater […]
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 […]
The Burgess Foundation’s archive includes a collection of audio recordings and films which exist in media such as Super 8, VHS and reel-to-reel audio tape. While some of this material has been digitised to allow easier access for researchers, other parts of the collection are still in their original formats. One intriguing item is a […]