A new selection of Burgess’s essays about music will be published on 25 January. Music surrounded Burgess throughout his early years in Manchester. He came from a family of musicians: his mother had been a music-hall singer, and his father played piano in pubs, music halls and silent cinemas. In his book about music and […]

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 […]

Burgess wrote this foreword to The Wanting Seed in 1982. The novel has recently appeared in Bulgarian and French. A new English edition has just been published in the Penguin Essentials collection. The Wanting Seed appeared in the autumn of 1962, with A Clockwork Orange, my other piece of futfic or future-fiction, pairing it in […]

In this episode of the Burgess Foundation podcast, Andrew Biswell of the Burgess Foundation explores fictional representations of Jesus Christ with writer Nicholas Graham, author of The Judas Case. We begin with Anthony Burgess’s 1979 novel, Man of Nazareth, an ambitious account of Jesus’s life from the point of view of a fictional Greek merchant. […]

Manchester Literature Festival and Manchester UNESCO City of Literature are delighted to appoint Peter Bakowski and Jake Goldwasser as the Virtual Writers in Residence for the second Festival of Libraries. Following in the digital foot-steps of 2021 writers Alicia Sometimes and Anna Polonyi, Melbourne poet Peter Bakowski will be hosted by the International Anthony Burgess […]

This episode of the Burgess Foundation Podcast is the first in an occasional series in which we speak to the current translators of Anthony Burgess’s novels to find out the delights and challenges involved in making them understandable in different languages and cultures. Our first guest in this series is Ludger Tolksdorf, who has spent […]

Manchester City of Literature and Manchester Literature Festival are offering two virtual writer residencies to take place in June 2022 during the Festival of Libraries. During the three-week residency, writers will be hosted remotely by either Chetham’s Library or the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, with the opportunity to explore the online archives, meet staff to […]

Laura Tunbridge gave the tenth annual Anthony Burgess Lecture at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation on 14 October 2021, exploring Beethoven’s life and work and discussing Anthony Burgess’s lifelong engagement with both. We are delighted to present the lecture as the latest episode of the Burgess Foundation podcast. Laura is Professor of Music at the […]

One of the central roles of the Burgess Foundation is to support new research into Burgess’s life and work. We have hosted researchers from all over the world, and continued to assist them in accessing the archive throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. In recent years, we have collaborated with the White Rose College of the Arts […]

Here at the Burgess Foundation, we are immersed in the world of Anthony Burgess. We revel in finding out small details about his life and career, we scour the archive for previously unknown facts and we have dedicated ourselves to bringing previously unpublished writing into print. We sometimes forget that, because of the sheer number […]