Let’s rewind the clock to the 2017 world premiere of The World Was Once All Miracle, composer Raymond Yiu’s song cycle based on the works of Anthony Burgess. The BBC Philharmonic concert was hosted on 4 July 2017 by Manchester International Festival, and was part of a year-long celebration of the centenary of Burgess’s birth. […]
New research into the Foundation’s archive of literary manuscripts has uncovered a number of previously unknown poems and songs by Anthony Burgess. To celebrate the 104th anniversary of Burgess’s birth on 25 February 2021, and the US publication of Collected Poems on the same date, we are presenting one of the new poems here. ‘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 present an online series called The Clockwork Collection, with a focus on A Clockwork Orange. Each month, we’ll be sharing a […]
When James Joyce died in Zurich on 13 January 1941, Anthony Burgess was a soldier with 189 Field Ambulance in the Royal Army Medical Corps, living in a barracks near Morpeth in Northumberland. News was slow to travel from Switzerland to Britain, and it took more than a week for Burgess to find out that […]
Last year was a period of great activity for the Burgess Foundation, with a lively programme of online exhibitions, lectures, podcasts and other events. Now that 2021 is underway, we are looking forward to revisiting some of Burgess’s best-known work. As many readers will know, this year is the fiftieth anniversary of Stanley Kubrick’s A […]
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. […]
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 […]
We are very sad to learn that the composer, writer, scholar and educator Alan Shockley has died. A friend and supporter of the Anthony Burgess Foundation, Alan was a constant and convivial presence at the many conferences which took place in Liverpool, Manchester, Angers, Kuala Lumpur and in the United States. He was a brilliant […]
In 1965, the year before Burgess published his spy novel, Tremor of Intent, Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels sold more than 15 million paperback copies in the UK alone. Given the vast enthusiasm for espionage fiction on the part of the book-buying public, it’s understandable that Burgess was keen to cash in on this publishing […]
When the atomic bomb destroyed the Japanese city of Hiroshima in August 1945, more than 140,000 people lost their lives, either in the blast itself or as a result of radiation sickness afterwards. This catastrophic event inaugurated a new era in world history and politics. From 1945 onwards, everyone would be living in the shadow […]