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. […]
As he approaches the end of his research into Anthony Burgess’s 1973 Shakespeare lectures, PhD student Sam Jermy casts a light on Burgess’s fascination with the boorish knight Falstaff — including the unpublished Sir John Falstaff va alla Guerra. In his lecture course ‘William Shakespeare: The Man and His Work’ delivered at City College New […]
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 […]
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 […]
The Foundation supports academic study into Anthony Burgess. In this guest blog post, PhD student Sam Jermy writes about his work on Burgess and Shakespeare, and his new research project with the Foundation. Anthony Burgess was continually interested and engaged with the writing, world and life of William Shakespeare. This creative engagement was sustained throughout […]
We are very sorry to learn of the death of Professor Harold Bloom, who was an honorary patron of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation. Harold Bloom was one of the most distinguished literary critics of the last century, with his works The Anxiety of Influence (1973) and The Western Canon (1994) informing several generations of […]
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 […]
In 1968, Anthony Burgess sold his properties in Chiswick and Etchingham and moved to Malta. The journey to his new home was undertaken by road, in a Bedford Dormobile driven by his new wife, Liana. As they drove south across Europe, Burgess sat in the back of the motor-caravan with his typewriter. Later he wrote: […]
In 1972, Burgess collaborated with the composer Stanley Silverman on a version of Sophocles’s Oedipus the King for the Tyrone Guthrie Theater in Minnesota. This production, notable for Burgess’s invention of language based on Indo-European, premiered that year, and was revived in 2017 as a radio play on BBC Radio 3. Oedipus the King was […]