The first object is the bust of Anthony Burgess by the American artist Milton Hebald (1917-2015). This bust appeared on the front cover of both volumes of Burgess’s biography, Little Wilson and Big God (1987) and You’ve Had Your Time (1990). It was made in 1970, when Burgess and his second wife Liana had recently […]

‘Religion is the oppressor. True, it has given us art, music, architecture of unsurpassable beauty, but that does not prevent it from being a roof over the heads of shivering people scared of engaging the huge windy blackness without. Man invented God because he knew no better – the great unpredictable father, indulgent or angry, […]

I remember both Anthony and Liana Burgess well and with affection. The first time I met Anthony Burgess was after the publication of his book A Shorter Finnegans Wake. I was then an undergraduate in Trinity College Dublin and presented a paper to the Philosophical Society about James Joyce circa 1964. Anthony Burgess was the […]

I first met Anthony in 1969 in Vancouver, British Columbia. He had been invited to lecture at Simon Fraser University. I was then on the faculty of Royal Roads in Victoria, a branch of the Royal Military College. His lecture was well attended, and he delighted the audience with accounts of his travels that had […]

  Our new exhibition examines Anthony Burgess’s experiences in Malaya in the 1950s, where he worked as a teacher at the Malay College in Kuala Kangsar and at the Malayan Teachers’ Training College at Kota Bharu in the district of Kelantan. As a fluent speaker of Malay and Chinese, Burgess was able to experience the […]

The actual Observer / Anthony Burgess Arts Journalism prize is an elegant thing of modernist beauty — a clear Perspex block, small and neat, stamped with the picture of a stylish black typewriter.  It is, charmingly, modelled after an arts journalism prize once won by Burgess himself  (this detail tells something of the care with […]

Being awarded the Observer/Anthony Burgess Prize was an unbelievable privilege. Apart from being published in the Observer and the cash prize (which I put towards research trips for future writing), it was an invaluable insight into newspapers’ commissioning processes. I’m very grateful for the contact and guidance I’ve had since. It was a pleasure to […]

What makes good criticism? It’s a big question, especially in this age where there are more critics than ever. Specialist blogs proliferate; anyone with a social media handle can review the latest films, novels, albums, plates of food…. Firstly, it’s important to separate general cultural criticism from academic criticism. The latter is deep-delving, forensically detailed. […]

I am delighted to be judging the Anthony Burgess prize. At a time when the arts pages in many of our newspapers are under threat, it seems doubly important to celebrate the role of arts journalism both as a necessary tool in enabling the circulation of books, pictures and films and as an art form […]

For me, winning the first ever Anthony Burgess/Observer Prize in 2012 ­­– as opposed to an award given in any other similarly esteemed writer’s name – had a uniquely personal resonance. To someone who grew up in the north-west, without obvious advantages of birth or connection, and who went on to study and compose music, all the while harbouring a passion […]