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 […]

We reveal a gruesome inspiration behind Anthony Burgess’s novel Earthly Powers: the Jonestown suicide cult leader Jim Jones. One of the pivotal events in Earthly Powers is the establishment and violent dissolution of Godfrey Manning’s religious cult, known as the ‘Children of God’. Although this cult seems to be well ingrained in the narrative of […]

You are invited to join the Earthly Powers Reading Group Earthly Powers is Anthony Burgess’s longest and most ambitious novel. This epic saga, which takes in two world wars and some of the darkest moments in twentieth-century history, is regarded by many as Burgess’s masterpiece. Throughout 2020, the International Anthony Burgess Foundation is celebrating the […]

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 […]

Andrew Biswell: How to read Earthly Powers ‘The ideal reader of my books,’ Anthony Burgess told John Cullinan of the Paris Review in 1973, ‘is a lapsed Catholic and failed musician, short-sighted, colour-blind, auditorily biased, who has read the books that I have read. He should also be about my age.’ Readers who lack those […]

As we celebrate the 40th anniversary of Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers, we look at Burgess’s attitude towards Somerset Maugham. When Anthony Burgess began his career as a novelist, inspired by his experience of teaching English in colonial Malaya, his goal was to become a sort of Somerset Maugham figure. In particular, he wanted to emulate Maugham’s […]

Although A Clockwork Orange is Anthony Burgess’s best-known novel, many readers regard Earthly Powers as his masterpiece. When the novel was first published in October 1980, Burgess received a telegram from his French translator, who wrote: ‘It is your Ulysses.’ Unlike most of Burgess’s novels, which he wrote in the space of a few months, […]

A topical blogpost for Easter. By Will Carr.

The fascinating typescript of Burgess’s epic novel. By Andrew Biswell.