Anthony Burgess was born on 25 February 1917. On the occasion of his 108th birthday, we look forward to future publications and other forthcoming Burgess-related events. It was Amol Rajan, the presenter of University Challenge and the Today programme on BBC Radio 4, who spoke recently of ‘the great, late Anthony Burgess.’ Of his lateness […]
Translating Burgess / Burgess Translating We are pleased to invite applications for a funded PhD studentship, which will focus on translations of Burgess’s novels, and the work of Anthony and Liana Burgess as literary translators. The successful candidate will be jointly supervised by University of Manchester and the International Anthony Burgess Foundation. The deadline for […]
In this episode of the Burgess Foundation Podcast, we’re exploring the making of the new documentary film, A Clockwork Orange: The Prophecy, with the directors Elisa Mantin and Benoit Felici. A Clockwork Orange: The Prophecy, is the first new documentary to focus on Burgess since The Burgess Variations in 1999. Drawing on archive footage, startling new animations, […]
A new selection of Burgess’s essays about music will be published on 25 January. Music surrounded Burgess throughout his early years in Manchester. He came from a family of musicians: his mother had been a music-hall singer, and his father played piano in pubs, music halls and silent cinemas. In his book about music and […]
Martin Amis, who died in May 2023 at the age of 73, was one of the most widely admired figures in Anglo-American literary fiction, bestriding the world of books like a colossus from the 1970s until the 2020s. He engaged widely with contemporary fiction through his work as a literary journalist and interviewer. It was […]
Burgess wrote this foreword to The Wanting Seed in 1982. The novel has recently appeared in Bulgarian and French. A new English edition has just been published in the Penguin Essentials collection. The Wanting Seed appeared in the autumn of 1962, with A Clockwork Orange, my other piece of futfic or future-fiction, pairing it in […]
The latest publication to emerge from the Burgess Foundation’s archive of manuscripts is Chatsky and Miser, Miser! In these two stage plays, published for the first time by Salamander Street, Burgess adapts and revives major monuments of French and Russian theatre: The Miser by Molière and the Russian comedy Chatsky by Alexander Griboyedov. Chatsky, to […]
Anthony Burgess published his shorter version of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake in 1966. He was invited to edit the book by Peter du Sautoy, one of Joyce’s executors and a senior publisher at Faber, following the success of Burgess’s BBC television documentary about Joyce, Silence, Exile and Cunning, broadcast the previous year. Faber had already […]
Preserving the Burgess Foundation’s collection of books, archival records, and objects is an ongoing challenge. Time spent in countries such as Malaya and Brunei, as well as travels throughout Europe, America, and the UK, brought with it exposure to termites, damp, floods, heat, and sunlight. Such conditions, coupled with frequent handling and the passage of […]
There seems to be a widespread assumption, often repeated on social media, that Anthony Burgess was a political conservative whose novels promote a right-wing agenda. Although Burgess sometimes claimed to take no interest in party politics, his position turns out to be a more complicated one than expected. Looking into his novels, autobiographical works and […]