Anthony Burgess died in London on 22 November 1993. He was 76 years old and had been diagnosed with lung cancer just over a year previously. The final phase of his life was characterised by intense creative production, in a variety of forms. The publication of a long novel about the rediscovery of the sword […]
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 […]
2022 is the sixtieth publication anniversary of A Clockwork Orange, which appeared in Britain in May 1962. In the first in a series of articles about the publishing history and critical reception of the novel, we consider the book’s Russian context. Many readers have wondered why Anthony Burgess decided to use Russian as the basis […]
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 […]
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 are launching a new online series, with a focus on A Clockwork Orange. Each month, we’ll be sharing a highlight from […]
Looking back on the life and work of Llewela Jones (1920-1968). Anthony Burgess’s first wife, born Llewela Jones and later known as Lynne, would have celebrated her 100th birthday on 24 November 2020. Many readers are familiar with the portrait of her given by Burgess in his two volumes of autobiography, Little Wilson and Big […]
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. […]
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 […]
Near the beginning of Honey for the Bears, Anthony Burgess’s 1963 novel set in Leningrad, there is a reference to the Cambridge spies: Not everything you do has to be political. Like those diplomats that went over that time. For all anybody knows they might have gone over because of their stomachs. In Russia, nobody […]