In this birthday blog post, we consider some of the anniversaries celebrated by Anthony Burgess in his literature and music. 25 February is the 107th anniversary of Anthony Burgess’s birth in Harpurhey, north Manchester. His original name was John Anthony Burgess Wilson. As he writes in Little Wilson and Big God, the first volume of […]

Anthony Burgess died in London on 22 November 1993. He was 76 years old and had been diagnosed with lung cancer just over a year previously. The final phase of his life was characterised by intense creative production, in a variety of forms. The publication of a long novel about the rediscovery of the sword […]

In our latest article for the Inside The Archive blog series, we consider the extensive collection of poems by Anthony Burgess in the Manchester archive. Anthony Burgess never lost his early passion for poetry and continued to experiment and engage with this literary form throughout his career. In the new edition of Burgess’s Collected Poems […]

Anthony Burgess was fascinated by the life and work of Sigmund Freud. As a writer and composer, he often returned to the founder of modern psychoanalysis in his creative works. The list begins with his stage adaptation of Oedipus the King in 1972 (a consciously Freudian work). This was accompanied by the novel MF, which […]

Throughout his career, Anthony Burgess emphasised his status as a Mancunian who defined himself in opposition to the London literary establishment. In his biography of Shakespeare (1970), he draws parallels between himself and the playwright’s childhood and education away from the capital. Yet, like Shakespeare, Burgess was drawn to London from the provinces, and the […]