Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers is a book made up of other books. The Earthly Powers Bookshelf charts that literary map, using as its base Burgess’s library at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation. Anthony Burgess lived and worked in the Federation of Malaya between 1954 and 1957. He was a witness to the brutal civil war […]

Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers is a book made up of other books. The Earthly Powers Bookshelf charts that literary map, using as its base Burgess’s library at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation. Anthony Burgess described the protagonist of Earthly Powers as ‘an aging homosexual writer based on William Somerset Maugham’. The source of this inspiration […]

Earthly Powers is a book that is made up of other books. The story of Kenneth M. Toomey is directly inspired by Anthony Burgess’s immense knowledge of literature and the literary world. These inspirations vary from the biographies of authors and other celebrated figures to interpretive readings of other books. Burgess uses both fiction and […]

As we celebrate the 40th anniversary of Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers, we look at Burgess’s attitude towards Somerset Maugham. When Anthony Burgess began his career as a novelist, inspired by his experience of teaching English in colonial Malaya, his goal was to become a sort of Somerset Maugham figure. In particular, he wanted to emulate Maugham’s […]

On the publication of Beds In The East, 1959.

The fascinating typescript of Burgess’s epic novel. By Andrew Biswell.