In 1948 Anthony Burgess began a teaching job as a lecturer in speech and drama at Bamber Bridge Emergency Training College, near Preston in Lancashire. He trained teachers as part of the post-war project to turn ex-servicemen into schoolmasters, and they were given an intensive one-year course: Burgess gave courses in the history of drama […]

Philip Larkin, who was born 100 years ago, was a twentieth-century novelist, poet and music critic whose place among the immortals remains uncertain. Although Larkin’s writing was popular during his lifetime, his reputation was badly damaged by the revelation, in a posthumous edition of his letters, that he was an enthusiastic racist and misogynist. His […]

In 1984, Anthony Burgess published Ninety-Nine Novels, a selection of his favourite novels in English since 1939. The list is typically idiosyncratic, and shows the breadth of Burgess’s interest in fiction. This podcast, by the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, explores the novels on Burgess’s list with the help of writers, critics and other special guests. […]

One of the key episodes in Earthly Powers is the trial scene in chapter 64, where Kenneth Toomey stands up in a London magistrate’s court to defend a fellow writer who has been accused of publishing a blasphemous poem. In the course of giving evidence, Toomey makes a public declaration of his homosexuality, which he […]

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 […]

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occasional pieces, translations from the Roman poet Belli, the full text of his verse novel Moses, and previously unpublished longer works.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 […]

When the atomic bomb destroyed the Japanese city of Hiroshima in August 1945, more than 140,000 people lost their lives, either in the blast itself or as a result of radiation sickness afterwards. This catastrophic event inaugurated a new era in world history and politics. From 1945 onwards, everyone would be living in the shadow […]

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 came of age as modernism was approaching its peak, and the movement influenced much of his writing and music. As a young man, Burgess was inspired by writers such as James Joyce and T.S. Eliot; and, as a musician, he was excited by the revolutionary compositions of Stravinsky, Berg, Honneger and Mossolov. Reacting […]

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 […]