We’ve been so busy exploring the works of the writer Anthony Burgess that we feel we’ve ignored the works of another great writer: Kenneth Toomey, the playwright protagonist of Burgess’s Earthly Powers. One of Burgess’s themes in Earthly Powers is the distance between artistic integrity and commercial success. His protagonist Kenneth Toomey harbours ambitions to […]

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 […]

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 […]

Andrew Biswell: How to read Earthly Powers ‘The ideal reader of my books,’ Anthony Burgess told John Cullinan of the Paris Review in 1973, ‘is a lapsed Catholic and failed musician, short-sighted, colour-blind, auditorily biased, who has read the books that I have read. He should also be about my age.’ Readers who lack those […]

A topical blogpost for Easter. By Will Carr.

The fascinating typescript of Burgess’s epic novel. By Andrew Biswell.