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 […]
As part of our celebrations of Anthony Burgess’s centenary in 2017 we are delighted to announce the shortlist for the Observer/Anthony Burgess Prizes for Arts Journalism. Now in their fifth year, the prizes of £3000 for the winner and £500 for two runners-up are for previously unpublished, imaginative, original, and thought-provoking arts journalism, and they […]
In 1974, when I was a Senior Lecturer in the English Department at Birmingham University, pursuing a twin career as novelist and critic, I was invited by the British Council to do what they called a ‘Specialist Tour’ in Italy, giving lectures at several universities. My itinerary began in Naples and ended in Milan, with […]
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 […]