In which our author hunts for the Moonstone and rewrites Sherlock Holmes. Although Anthony Burgess is often thought of as an upmarket literary writer, he was deeply engaged throughout his writing life with popular forms of writing. Beyond his involvement in writing historical fiction, science fiction, and Cold War spy novels, he had a serious […]
Anthony Burgess wrote this essay for the New York Times in 1970, the year in which his Shakespeare biography was published. After completing a lecture tour of Europe and the United States, he was teaching at Princeton University. I’ve spent the last couple of years, off and on, in two worlds simultaneously — imaginatively in […]
John Barth, who died on 2 April 2024 at the age of 93, was at the forefront of experimental literature in the 1960s and beyond. Even before the word ‘postmodernism’ was widely used, Barth attempted to diagnose the state of literature in the post-war period and articulated ways for writers to overcome what he described […]
Our annual competition to find the best in new arts reviews has launched, and this year we are delighted to welcome Observer pop critic Kitty Empire to the judging panel. The Observer / Anthony Burgess Prize for Arts Journalism challenges writers to create an engaging 800-word review of a work in the arts. It’s run […]
2021 marks the 50th anniversary of the first release of Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of A Clockwork Orange and 60 years since Anthony Burgess completed his most famous novel. To celebrate the anniversary, we present an online series called The Clockwork Collection, with a focus on A Clockwork Orange. Each month, we’ll be sharing a […]
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 […]
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. As the typescript of Earthly Powers approached the end of its decade-long gestation in 1979, there was a significant hole in the book. […]
Anthony Burgess’s Shakespeare was published in 1970 by Jonathan Cape as a lavishly illustrated folio-sized volume. Burgess described his biography as a way of using up the research he had undertaken for a film about Shakespeare’s life that he’d written for Warner Brothers, commissioned in 1968 and cancelled three years later. The UK hardback edition […]
Breaking news: As part of our ongoing ‘Inside the Archive’ series, we dig into Anthony Burgess’s journalistic career — and his attitude towards it. The journalism collection at the Burgess Foundation contains more than three thousand reviews and essays. There are pieces by Anthony Burgess from the very beginnings of his writing career to the […]
We are delighted to announce the results of the 2020 Observer / Burgess Prize. The Observer/Anthony Burgess Prize for Arts Journalism is a review-writing prize encouraging budding journalists to submit previously unpublished works of up to 800 words. It is run by the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in partnership with The Observer newspaper. Our judges […]