It is now 100 years since the birth, in Manchester, of a boy christened John Burgess Wilson, who at his confirmation into the Roman Catholic Church took the name of Anthony, patron saint of lost objects. About forty years later, he began to be modestly well known under the nom de plume of ‘Anthony Burgess’ […]
The International Anthony Burgess Foundation and the Observer newspaper are delighted to announce the winners of the latest Observer / Anthony Burgess Prizes for Arts Journalism, who were unveiled at a special event at King’s Place, London on Thursday 23 February. Judges Robert McCrum (Associate Editor), Sarah Donaldson (Arts Editor) and Andrew Biswell (Director, International Anthony Burgess Foundation) welcomed […]
One of my favourite authors, the delightfully chaotic Anthony Burgess, bought a splendid old house in Lija, the village next to ours. With his lively second wife and their small son, he had now moved to Malta where, like me, he was enjoying the escape from city pressure. But there was one big difference between […]
The Burgess Foundation’s archive includes a collection of audio recordings and films which exist in media such as Super 8, VHS and reel-to-reel audio tape. While some of this material has been digitised to allow easier access for researchers, other parts of the collection are still in their original formats. One intriguing item is a […]
Anthony Burgess is the greatest of Manchester’s writers, and if he possesses all our virtues, he more than shares our vices. A Mancunian who has made a splash in the arts or letters is automatically a public intellectual, at least in their own head. There is a loud, ostentatious intelligence to the city’s writers that […]
Burgess’s inscribed copy of Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here (1935) displays the tag-line ‘The Ultimate Triumph of the Silent Majority’, something that indicates the novel’s relevance today. Burgess says in The Novel Now (1967), the book proves that ‘America can have its own bad dreams’, with antagonist Senator ‘Buzz’ Windrip securing presidential victory, dissolving […]
ONE: He wrote books under three different names. Born John Burgess Wilson in 1917, he adopted the pen-name ‘Anthony Burgess’ in 1956, when he published his first novel, Time for a Tiger. He also published two books as Joseph Kell, and a volume of literary history as John Burgess Wilson. He wanted to publish his […]
Knowing of his love for and great knowledge of music, I interviewed Anthony in 1968 for one of the first BBC films I ever made, All My Loving, which was essentially about ‘pop music’ and all that that entailed in the late 1960s. The Monterey Festival was behind us, and Woodstock still to come. But […]
In 1975, Anthony Burgess was approached by Richard-Gabriel Rummonds to provide an original piece of writing for a new publication. Rummond’s Plain Wrapper Press was based in Verona, Italy, and was well regarded as a publisher of fine-press books, especially after the success of Jorge Luis Borges’s Seven Saxon Poems in 1974. This volume contained […]
In 1980 Anthony Burgess spent a week at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, delivering the John Crowe Ransom Memorial Lectures. As Editor of The Kenyon Review at that time, I spent a good deal of time talking with Anthony, but there are two stories that should be preserved. One afternoon at lunch, we were discussing […]