The Foundation supports academic study into Anthony Burgess. In this guest blog post, PhD researcher Milena Schwab-Graham writes about her work on the extensive Anthony Burgess cassette tape collection. In This Man and Music (1982), Anthony Burgess’s collection of essays exploring the interconnections between music and literature, he calls himself a ‘faker, a patcher, something […]
Anthony Burgess is well known as a writer from Manchester who lived in places such as Malaya and Monaco, but the period of his residence in London is less well documented. This article looks at the books and other writing projects he worked on during the five years he lived at 24 Glebe Street in […]
When James Joyce died in Zurich on 13 January 1941, Anthony Burgess was a soldier with 189 Field Ambulance in the Royal Army Medical Corps, living in a barracks near Morpeth in Northumberland. News was slow to travel from Switzerland to Britain, and it took more than a week for Burgess to find out that […]
Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers is a book made up of other books. The Earthly Powers Bookshelf charts that literary map, using as its base Burgess’s library at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation. The novel which exerted the strongest influence on Anthony Burgess’s literary work is undoubtedly Ulysses by James Joyce, which he first read as […]
We are very sad to learn that the composer, writer, scholar and educator Alan Shockley has died. A friend and supporter of the Anthony Burgess Foundation, Alan was a constant and convivial presence at the many conferences which took place in Liverpool, Manchester, Angers, Kuala Lumpur and in the United States. He was a brilliant […]
In 1965, the year before Burgess published his spy novel, Tremor of Intent, Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels sold more than 15 million paperback copies in the UK alone. Given the vast enthusiasm for espionage fiction on the part of the book-buying public, it’s understandable that Burgess was keen to cash in on this publishing […]
When Anthony Burgess joined City College New York in 1972 for a year as a Distinguished Visiting Professor of English Literature and Creative Writing, it is not clear that he knew what he was letting himself in for. Burgess had previously taught at a number of elite American universities, including the University of North Carolina […]
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 […]
Although A Clockwork Orange is Anthony Burgess’s best-known novel, many readers regard Earthly Powers as his masterpiece. When the novel was first published in October 1980, Burgess received a telegram from his French translator, who wrote: ‘It is your Ulysses.’ Unlike most of Burgess’s novels, which he wrote in the space of a few months, […]
The latest title to appear in the Irwell Edition is This Man and Music. This Man and Music blends musical autobiography and literary analysis to create a hybrid book which reveals much about Anthony Burgess’s creative process and cultural obsessions. Best known as a writer of fiction, Burgess also devoted much of his time to musical […]