Looking back on the life and work of Llewela Jones (1920-1968). Anthony Burgess’s first wife, born Llewela Jones and later known as Lynne, would have celebrated her 100th birthday on 24 November 2020. Many readers are familiar with the portrait of her given by Burgess in his two volumes of autobiography, Little Wilson and Big […]

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 one of the most memorable scenes in Earthly Powers, Philip Shawcross, a British man in Malaya, apparently possessed by demons, undergoes an […]

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. Throughout his writing career Anthony Burgess was inspired by the conflict between the teachings of Saint Augustine and the British monk Pelagius. Augustine, […]

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. The plot of Earthly Powers is built around Carlo Campanati, a Catholic priest whose impious attitude to life does not prevent him from […]

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 […]

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. The novel which exerted the strongest influence on Anthony Burgess’s literary work is undoubtedly Ulysses by James Joyce, which he first read as […]

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. Anthony Burgess described the protagonist of Earthly Powers as ‘an aging homosexual writer based on William Somerset Maugham’. The source of this inspiration […]

Earthly Powers is a book that is made up of other books. The story of Kenneth M. Toomey is directly inspired by Anthony Burgess’s immense knowledge of literature and the literary world. These inspirations vary from the biographies of authors and other celebrated figures to interpretive readings of other books. Burgess uses both fiction and […]

Burgess’s essay about the city of his birth was first published in the Manchester Evening News on 1 December 1984. Telling Southerners that I am a Mancunian, I sometimes get the silly response ‘What did you say — a Manchurian?’ Meaning that the south of England still likes to think that Manchester is remote and […]

We are very sad to learn that the composer, writer, scholar and educator Alan Shockley has died. A friend and supporter of the Anthony Burgess Foundation, Alan was a constant and convivial presence at the many conferences which took place in Liverpool, Manchester, Angers, Kuala Lumpur and in the United States. He was a brilliant […]