In 1969 Anthony Burgess started a month-long residency at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It was an important period for Burgess in many ways, giving him his first extended visit to an American university campus, and it helped to develop the American influence on novels such as MF and Earthly Powers. While at Chapel Hill, he met a graduate student called Ben Forkner, who was tasked with showing the Burgess family around the university and the surrounding area. The two men quickly became friends, bonding over their shared love of Irish literature, in particular the work of James Joyce. Their friendship lasted until Burgess’s death in 1993.

In this podcast episode, Ben Forkner shares some of his memories of Burgess in Chapel Hill and France, where he moved in the early 1970s. Forkner spoke to us by telephone from his home in Angers in December 2024, and clips of the interview are included in this episode, along with readings from his introduction to One Man’s Chorus, an edited collection of Burgess’s journalism, and a recording of Burgess reading poetry by Gerard Manley Hopkins, which Forkner has donated to the Burgess Foundation’s archive.

You can read Ben Forkner’s introduction to his collection of Burgess’s essays, One Man’s Chorus, here.

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