Our annual competition to find the best in new arts reviews has launched, and this year we are delighted to welcome Observer pop critic Kitty Empire to the judging panel. The Observer / Anthony Burgess Prize for Arts Journalism challenges writers to create an engaging 800-word review of a work in the arts. It’s run […]
The second in our series of Dystopian Dialogues is a conversation with Nathan Waddell from the University of Birmingham about George Orwell, Anthony Burgess and dystopia. Burgess was strongly influenced by Orwell, and in his book 1985 he places Nineteen Eighty-Four in the context of a ravaged post-war Britain. He writes: ‘You saw the effects […]
In the second part of our podcast exploration of A Clockwork Orange’s life on the stage (listen to the previous podcast episode here), Will Carr from the Burgess Foundation speaks to director Alexandra Spencer-Jones and actor Martin McCreadie, the creative forces behind Action to the Word’s powerful version of Burgess’s story. This innovative all-male production […]
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 […]
As Christine Lee Gengaro, editor of the new Irwell Edition of This Man and Music, points out, ‘The book might more accurately have been called This Man, Music, and Literature, or Music, Literature, and This Man. But as it stands, the title This Man and Music is misleading.’ Indeed it is, for less than a […]
The actor Paul Barnhill reads extracts from ‘Sonata in H’, a reflection on the atomic age, written by Anthony Burgess while he was living in Adderbury, Oxfordshire, in the 1950s. The complete text of this long poem will be published by Incline Press in 2021. The video was recorded in July 2020 at the International […]
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 […]
Anthony Burgess published this essay to mark the fortieth anniversary of the destruction of Hiroshima in August 1985. It is reprinted here as part of our online series ‘Burgess and the Atomic Age’, which includes poetry, performance and new articles. The Emperor Hirohito accepted the Allied terms on 14 August 1945, and Japan’s formal surrender […]
Throughout 2020, the International Anthony Burgess Foundation is celebrating the fortieth anniversary of Earthly Powers, Burgess’s longest and most accomplished novel. We have already launched a dedicated Earthly Powers micro-site and are looking forward to future meetings of the Earthly Powers reading group. We invite you to listen to our series of podcasts themed around Earthly Powers, in which […]
The Observer / Burgess Prize for Arts Journalism is now open for entries. Our annual review writing competition has a prize fund of £4,000 and an opportunity to be published in the Observer newspaper. Anthony Burgess wrote hundreds of articles for many publications, including the Times Literary Supplement, the Spectator and the Yorkshire Post, which […]