The Black Prince is a novel by Adam Roberts, adapted from an original script by Anthony Burgess and published by Unbound in 2018. Matthew Asprey Gear takes a closer look. The 1960s was a fine decade for films on the Plantagenets and Tudors, from Becket (1964) and The Lion in Winter (1968) to A Man […]
In the second blog post from our archive volunteers, Vivian Pencz shares her experience of working with one of Anthony Burgess’s unpublished notebooks as part of a remote transcription project. ‘Journal of the Plague Year 1951,’ declared the title of the first Burgess notebook I transcribed as a new Archive Volunteer for the Foundation. […]
Let’s rewind the clock to the 2017 world premiere of The World Was Once All Miracle, composer Raymond Yiu’s song cycle based on the works of Anthony Burgess. The BBC Philharmonic concert was hosted on 4 July 2017 by Manchester International Festival, and was part of a year-long celebration of the centenary of Burgess’s birth. […]
Clockwork Controversy: Myth: Anthony Burgess disliked the American ending of his novel, which omitted his final chapter. Fact: Burgess was unsure about how to end his novel from the beginning. He liked the American ending and authorised its publication. It was only later in life that he preferred the British ending. Anthony Burgess’s 1961 […]
New research into the Foundation’s archive of literary manuscripts has uncovered a number of previously unknown poems and songs by Anthony Burgess. To celebrate the 104th anniversary of Burgess’s birth on 25 February 2021, and the US publication of Collected Poems on the same date, we are presenting one of the new poems here. ‘A […]
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 present an online series called The Clockwork Collection, with a focus on A Clockwork Orange. Each month, we’ll be sharing a […]
In our latest article for the Inside The Archive blog series, we consider the extensive collection of poems by Anthony Burgess in the Manchester archive. Anthony Burgess never lost his early passion for poetry and continued to experiment and engage with this literary form throughout his career. In the new edition of Burgess’s Collected Poems […]
Raymond Yiu is a composer who first discovered the work of Anthony Burgess in the 1990s when he picked up a copy of This Man and Music in a second-hand bookshop. This led to a fascination with Burgess’s writing and music, which eventually inspired Raymond to compose The World Was Once All Miracle, an orchestral […]
In 2020, the Burgess Foundation was on the point of launching a new archive volunteer programme. The closure of our building due to the pandemic meant that we had to suspend all on-site activities. We explored options for working remotely with volunteers and, by October, we were ready to begin a remote transcription project with […]
One of Anthony Burgess’s first commissions from Penguin Books was to write an introduction to Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, published in 1966 as part of the Penguin English Library. His introduction is still available in the current Penguin Classics edition, and it remains a lively and thoughtful preparation for Defoe’s haunting […]