Burgess wrote this foreword to The Wanting Seed in 1982. The novel has recently appeared in Bulgarian and French. A new English edition has just been published in the Penguin Essentials collection. The Wanting Seed appeared in the autumn of 1962, with A Clockwork Orange, my other piece of futfic or future-fiction, pairing it in […]
We are pleased to invite you to a summer party to celebrate the publication of The Clockwork Testament. This is the latest volume in the Irwell Edition of the Works of Anthony Burgess, published by Manchester University Press. In this comic novel, the poet Enderby, writer in residence at the fictional University of Manhattan, takes […]
The latest publication to emerge from the Burgess Foundation’s archive of manuscripts is Chatsky and Miser, Miser! In these two stage plays, published for the first time by Salamander Street, Burgess adapts and revives major monuments of French and Russian theatre: The Miser by Molière and the Russian comedy Chatsky by Alexander Griboyedov. Chatsky, to […]
For about half a year I have been working with my fellow volunteer Kayleigh to explore the collection of artworks at the Burgess Foundation. If you are familiar with the Foundation’s archive, you will know that many areas within it remain uncatalogued. This remote project has helped the archive to chip away at cataloguing, and […]
Join us for a special insight into Anthony Burgess’s youth in the silent cinemas of 1920s Manchester. Burgess’s father was a pianoplayer (not a pianist) who played along with silent films in the picture-houses of his home city, improvising accompaniment to classics such as Metropolis and the Charlie Chaplin comedies. Burgess’s experiences were fictionalised in […]
101 years after James Joyce’s novel Ulysses first appeared in print, we are pleased to invite you to celebrate the publication anniversary of Anthony Burgess’s favourite book. Joyce’s epic novel is set in Dublin on a single day: 16 June 1904. This date has come to be known as ‘Bloomsday’ after the hero of the […]
Anthony Burgess published his shorter version of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake in 1966. He was invited to edit the book by Peter du Sautoy, one of Joyce’s executors and a senior publisher at Faber, following the success of Burgess’s BBC television documentary about Joyce, Silence, Exile and Cunning, broadcast the previous year. Faber had already […]
In the second of our blog posts about recent work to preserve the Foundation’s book collection, we focus on books relating to two of Burgess’s favourite writers: James Joyce and the Roman poet Giuseppe Gioachino Belli (1791-1823). (Read the previous post here.) Following repair work carried out by the book restorers Formbys, these volumes are […]
John Anthony Burgess Wilson was born in Harpurhey, north Manchester, on 25 February 1917, just as the pubs were opening. To celebrate his birthday, we are very pleased to present the first recording of Burgess’s Sonata for English Horn, composed as a gift for his son Andrew Burgess-Wilson, who was also a musician. The sonata […]
The winner of the 2023 Observer / Anthony Burgess Prize for Arts Journalism is En Liang Khong. His review of Tanoa Sasraku’s exhibition of Terratypes wins him the first prize of £3,000 and publication in the Observer newspaper. The £500 runner-up accolades go to Cerise Louisa Andrews, who wrote about the V&A’s exploration of Korean ‘Hallyu’ […]