Burgess’s essay about the city of his birth was first published in the Manchester Evening News on 1 December 1984. Telling Southerners that I am a Mancunian, I sometimes get the silly response ‘What did you say — a Manchurian?’ Meaning that the south of England still likes to think that Manchester is remote and […]

To celebrate the post-lockdown reopening of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, based in Anthony Burgess’s birth city of Manchester, we take a look at Burgess’s identity as a Mancunian. Anthony Burgess was born and educated in Manchester. His formative years in the city awakened in him a life-long love of literature, music, drama, and learning. […]

Throughout his career, Anthony Burgess emphasised his status as a Mancunian who defined himself in opposition to the London literary establishment. In his biography of Shakespeare (1970), he draws parallels between himself and the playwright’s childhood and education away from the capital. Yet, like Shakespeare, Burgess was drawn to London from the provinces, and the […]