In 1970, Burgess moved with his family from Malta to Italy. They settled in the town of Bracciano, where they bought a fifteenth-century house on the cobbled Piazza Padella. This house would be the centre of Burgess’s creative life until he moved to Monaco in 1975, despite frequent trips to Malta and the United States. […]

Anthony Burgess often collaborated with visual artists, such as Joe Tilson (for the art book, Will and Testament) and Fulvio Testa, who illustrated two books for children, A Long Trip to Teatime and The Land Where the Ice Cream Grows. Another collaboration took place in 1991, when he was invited by Stephen Spender and David […]

VHS cassettes became popular in the last decade of Anthony Burgess’s life, and the small collection of films on video cassettes in the Burgess Foundation archive shows that he embraced the new technology and watched many films from the comfort of his own living room. Burgess was an avid film viewer throughout his life, first […]

Throughout his career, Burgess enjoyed close relationships with other writers. Even before his first book had been published, he would associate with literary figures. In the early 1940s, while on leave from his Second World War posting to Gibraltar, he frequented the pubs of ‘Fitzrovia’, the area around Fitzroy Square in London. Pubs such as […]

From 1976, Anthony Burgess lived in a top-floor apartment on rue Grimaldi in Monaco. In 1988, there was an ingress of water from the roof of the building, which partly destroyed Burgess’s collection of manuscripts. According to a letter in the Burgess Foundation’s archive, the papers were being stored in a spare bathroom. Shortly after […]

This sketch by the Italian film director Franco Zeffirelli was drawn for Anthony Burgess’s son, Andrew (also known as Paolo Andrea). It appears to be a greeting for Easter 1979, and shows a recipe for a desert called ‘the sweet of “Passion”’. Zeffirelli describes it as an ‘Easter offering’. The ingredients include ricotta cheese, pistachios, […]

This recording of Anthony Burgess reading Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem ‘Pied Beauty’ is part of Burgess’s private audio collection. It was originally part of a larger recording intended to accompany Burgess’s book They Wrote In English (1979), written for Italian student of English Literature. The recording fell out of circulation shortly after it was produced. […]

Anthony Burgess often worked with visual artists, most notably with novels The Eve of St Venus (1964) and A Vision of Battlements (1965), both of which were illustrated by Edward Pagram. Other works, such as Beard’s Roman Women (1976) and Shakespeare (1970) were illustrated with photographs and, in the case of his biography of Shakespeare, […]

It is unusual for a literary archive to contain such a wide range of items as those which appear in the Burgess Foundation’s collection. One of the most surprising discoveries is that there are several bottles of wine stored among the manuscript pages, photographs and books. More surprising still is that the wines have remained undrunk. The bottles which survive […]

Many of the manuscripts in the archives at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation contain more than just words or music. Burgess was a prolific artist, drawing in the margins of typescripts, creating title pages for drafts of his novels, and sketching birthday cards for his son, Andrew. Burgess’s first published piece of work was not […]