Introduction to One Man’s Chorus by Ben Forkner This memoir of Anthony Burgess appeared as the introduction to One Man’s Chorus: The Uncollected Writings, a selection of Burgess’s journalism, edited by Ben Forkner and published in New York by Carroll & Graf in 1998. We are grateful to Ben Forkner for kindly giving permission to reproduce […]
In 1969 Anthony Burgess started a month-long residency at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It was an important period for Burgess in many ways, giving him his first extended visit to an American university campus, and it helped to develop the American influence on novels such as MF and Earthly Powers. While […]
Today sees the publication of Anthony Burgess’s Collected Poems by Carcanet Classics. Editor Jonathan Mann has gathered the largest collection yet of Burgess’s writing in verse into a single volume: early lyrics, occasional pieces, translations from the Roman poet Belli, the full text of his verse novel Moses, and previously unpublished longer works. In a […]
The latest title to appear in the Irwell Edition is This Man and Music. This Man and Music blends musical autobiography and literary analysis to create a hybrid book which reveals much about Anthony Burgess’s creative process and cultural obsessions. Best known as a writer of fiction, Burgess also devoted much of his time to musical […]
The Burgess Foundation’s collection of Anthony Burgess’s private library contains over 8000 volumes, many of which have come to us from Burgess’s houses around the world. Travels in Malaya, Malta, Italy and elsewhere, as well as the ravages of time, have unfortunately damaged some of the books: termites, floods, heat, sunlight and vigorous reading have […]
Anthony Burgess wrote about Christmas in a number of different contexts. His responses are always distinctive and flavoursome, like a glass of Madeira or a traditional British Christmas pudding, stuffed with fruit and sixpence coins. In the first volume of his autobiography, Little Wilson and Big God, Burgess recalls that one of his earliest published […]
From 1976, Anthony Burgess lived in a top-floor apartment on rue Grimaldi in Monaco. In 1988, there was an ingress of water from the roof of the building, which partly destroyed Burgess’s collection of manuscripts. According to a letter in the Burgess Foundation’s archive, the papers were being stored in a spare bathroom. Shortly after […]
This recording of Anthony Burgess reading Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem ‘Pied Beauty’ is part of Burgess’s private audio collection. It was originally part of a larger recording intended to accompany Burgess’s book They Wrote In English (1979), written for Italian student of English Literature. The recording fell out of circulation shortly after it was produced. […]