In this birthday blog post, we consider some of the anniversaries celebrated by Anthony Burgess in his literature and music. 25 February is the 107th anniversary of Anthony Burgess’s birth in Harpurhey, north Manchester. His original name was John Anthony Burgess Wilson. As he writes in Little Wilson and Big God, the first volume of […]
Martin Amis, who died in May 2023 at the age of 73, was one of the most widely admired figures in Anglo-American literary fiction, bestriding the world of books like a colossus from the 1970s until the 2020s. He engaged widely with contemporary fiction through his work as a literary journalist and interviewer. It was […]
Anthony Burgess published his shorter version of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake in 1966. He was invited to edit the book by Peter du Sautoy, one of Joyce’s executors and a senior publisher at Faber, following the success of Burgess’s BBC television documentary about Joyce, Silence, Exile and Cunning, broadcast the previous year. Faber had already […]
In the second of our blog posts about recent work to preserve the Foundation’s book collection, we focus on books relating to two of Burgess’s favourite writers: James Joyce and the Roman poet Giuseppe Gioachino Belli (1791-1823). (Read the previous post here.) Following repair work carried out by the book restorers Formbys, these volumes are […]
Peter Bakowski is Virtual Writer in Residence with the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, appointed for the Festival of Libraries (artwork pictured above) by Manchester Literature Festival and Manchester UNESCO City of Literature. He will be sharing some of his work later in the year. In the meantime, he reflects on his time with the Burgess […]
There seems to be a widespread assumption, often repeated on social media, that Anthony Burgess was a political conservative whose novels promote a right-wing agenda. Although Burgess sometimes claimed to take no interest in party politics, his position turns out to be a more complicated one than expected. Looking into his novels, autobiographical works and […]
In 2021, the youthful Manchester-based chamber ensemble No Dice Collective recorded a pair of seldom played compositions by Anthony Burgess, his Concerto for Flute, Strings and Piano in D Minor and Quartet for Flute, Oboe, ’Cello and Piano. Composed nearly forty years apart, these two works highlight complementary aspects of Burgess’s musical style. The concerto […]
The Foundation supports academic study into Anthony Burgess. In this second guest blog post (read the first one here), PhD researcher Milena Schwab-Graham writes about her work on the extensive Anthony Burgess cassette tape collection. For the past few months, my work as a researcher for the ‘Anthony Burgess on Tape’ project has been a […]
One of Anthony Burgess’s first commissions from Penguin Books was to write an introduction to Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, published in 1966 as part of the Penguin English Library. His introduction is still available in the current Penguin Classics edition, and it remains a lively and thoughtful preparation for Defoe’s haunting […]
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. Anthony Burgess lived and worked in the Federation of Malaya between 1954 and 1957. He was a witness to the brutal civil war […]