In 1948 Anthony Burgess began a teaching job as a lecturer in speech and drama at Bamber Bridge Emergency Training College, near Preston in Lancashire. He trained teachers as part of the post-war project to turn ex-servicemen into schoolmasters, and they were given an intensive one-year course: Burgess gave courses in the history of drama […]
Anthony Burgess’s second commission from Michael Langham, the artistic director of the Tyrone Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, was an adaptation of Oedipus the King by Sophocles. He had recently completed the novel MF, whose incest theme also reflected Burgess’s interest in Freud and Oedipus. He had little knowledge of Greek and a hazy knowledge of ancient […]
In 1970 Anthony Burgess was commissioned by the Tyrone Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis to make a new translation of Edmond de Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac. The artistic director Michael Langham was looking for a sharp, witty approach to the text and Burgess aimed to recreate what he described in You’ve Had Your Time as ‘the […]
Our short blog series Anthony Burgess and the Theatre opens the curtain on Burgess and his relation to the theatrical world. There will be a new post every Friday as we look forward to the publication of Salamander Street’s Chatsky & Miser! Miser!, a volume of two plays translated by Anthony Burgess. This series deliberately […]
In 1984, Anthony Burgess published Ninety-Nine Novels, a selection of his favourite novels in English since 1939. The list is typically idiosyncratic, and shows the breadth of Burgess’s interest in fiction. This podcast, by the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, explores the novels on Burgess’s list with the help of writers, critics and other special guests. In […]
Anthony Burgess used typewriters all his life in his spectacular production of more than sixty books and thousands of articles, reviews and essays. Our new exhibition, ‘Anthony Burgess’s Typewriters’, displays a selection of the many vintage typewriters that he used, and explores some of his writing about the machine that was always present in his […]
Clockwork Controversy: Myth: Anthony Burgess made millions from the film of A Clockwork Orange. Fact: Anthony Burgess sold the film rights to his novel for $5,000, and later had to sue for a tiny percentage of the profits. It is widely believed that anyone involved in a successful film reaps substantial financial rewards. Stanley Kubrick’s […]
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 presenting an online series called The Clockwork Collection, with a focus on A Clockwork Orange. Each month we’ll be sharing […]
To mark the 50th anniversary of the first release of Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of A Clockwork Orange, we present a weekly online series Anthony Burgess at the Movies in which we zoom in on Anthony Burgess’s interest in cinema. What Burgess says: ‘I have not seen this film since it first appeared (I saw […]
To mark the 50th anniversary of the first release of Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of A Clockwork Orange, we present a weekly online series Anthony Burgess at the Movies in which we zoom in on Anthony Burgess’s interest in cinema. What Burgess says: ‘Another film with a Scottish setting – totally authentic in its racial […]