Today sees the publication of Anthony Burgess’s Collected Poems by Carcanet Classics. Editor Jonathan Mann has gathered the largest collection yet of Burgess’s writing in verse into a single volume: early lyrics, occasional pieces, translations from the Roman poet Belli, the full text of his verse novel Moses, and previously unpublished longer works. In 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. In his article ‘Why I Wrote Earthly Powers’, Anthony Burgess explains that the original title of the novel was The Prince of the […]
To celebrate the reopening of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester, we look at Burgess’s identity as a Mancunian. Anthony Burgess left Manchester in 1940 and returned frequently in later years. The city and its people appear many times in Burgess’s writing — Manchester accents, landmarks, and even smells pervade his literary work. Remembering […]
To celebrate the post-lockdown reopening of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, based in Anthony Burgess’s birth city of Manchester, we take a look at Burgess’s identity as a Mancunian. Anthony Burgess was born and educated in Manchester. His formative years in the city awakened in him a life-long love of literature, music, drama, and learning. […]
Anthony Burgess’s Shakespeare was published in 1970 by Jonathan Cape as a lavishly illustrated folio-sized volume. Burgess described his biography as a way of using up the research he had undertaken for a film about Shakespeare’s life that he’d written for Warner Brothers, commissioned in 1968 and cancelled three years later. The UK hardback edition […]
We’ve been so busy exploring the works of the writer Anthony Burgess that we feel we’ve ignored the works of another great writer: Kenneth Toomey, the playwright protagonist of Burgess’s Earthly Powers. One of Burgess’s themes in Earthly Powers is the distance between artistic integrity and commercial success. His protagonist Kenneth Toomey harbours ambitions to […]
When Anthony Burgess joined City College New York in 1972 for a year as a Distinguished Visiting Professor of English Literature and Creative Writing, it is not clear that he knew what he was letting himself in for. Burgess had previously taught at a number of elite American universities, including the University of North Carolina […]
We look at the shorter pieces for piano written by Anthony Burgess, including the rather lively ‘Hornpipe’ Anthony Burgess’s ‘Hornpipe’ is an undated short piece for solo piano. Possibly part of an untitled set of six keyboard works, including three fugues, an air, and a passacaglia, its lively and simple melody is based on a […]
Our Inside The Archive blog series casts new light onto the Burgess Foundation’s collections. In this post, we take a leaf from Anthony Burgess’s notebooks. Fourteen of Anthony Burgess’s diaries and notebooks survive in the collections at the Burgess Foundation, containing fragmentary but intriguing manuscript material dating from 1940 to 1977. Burgess was not an […]
Anthony Burgess Earthly Powers is full of literary figures, with perhaps the most notable cameo being James Joyce. On Bloomsday, we examine this most famous novelist inside a novel. Earthly Powers is full of fictional representations of writers. The protagonist Kenneth Toomey takes up with invented poets (Val Wrigley, Roger Pembroke), discovers the novels of […]