John Anthony Burgess Wilson was born in Harpurhey, north Manchester, on 25 February 1917, just as the pubs were opening. To celebrate his birthday, we are very pleased to present the first recording of Burgess’s Sonata for English Horn, composed as a gift for his son Andrew Burgess-Wilson, who was also a musician. The sonata […]
Our short blog series Anthony Burgess and the Theatre opens the curtain on Burgess and his relation to the theatrical world. There will be a new post every Friday as we look forward to the publication of Salamander Street’s Chatsky & Miser! Miser!, a volume of two plays translated by Anthony Burgess. This series deliberately […]
To mark the 50th anniversary of the first release of Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of A Clockwork Orange, we present a weekly online series Anthony Burgess at the Movies in which we zoom in on Anthony Burgess’s interest in cinema. In this episode of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation podcast, we explore the influence of […]
To mark the 50th anniversary of the first release of Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of A Clockwork Orange, we present a weekly online series Anthony Burgess at the Movies in which we zoom in on Anthony Burgess’s interest in cinema. What Burgess says: ‘One of the finest films Fritz Lang made for UFA. Where it […]
To mark the 50th anniversary of the first release of Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of A Clockwork Orange, we present a weekly online series Anthony Burgess at the Movies in which we zoom in on Anthony Burgess’s interest in cinema. In 1923, at the age of six, Anthony Burgess had his first experience of the […]
2021 marks the 50th anniversary of the first release of Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of A Clockwork Orange, and 60 years since Anthony Burgess completed his most famous novel. To celebrate the anniversary, we present an online series called The Clockwork Collection, with a focus on A Clockwork Orange. Each month, we’ll be sharing a […]
John Osborne’s 1956 play Look Back in Anger inspired the term ‘angry young men’ to describe a group of writers whose uncompromising and accessible works reflected a disillusionment with British society in the post-war period. Their world was run-down and meagre, and its protagonists were trapped in unfulfilled lives, resenting authority figures whose pretentiousness was […]
One of Anthony Burgess’s first commissions from Penguin Books was to write an introduction to Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, published in 1966 as part of the Penguin English Library. His introduction is still available in the current Penguin Classics edition, and it remains a lively and thoughtful preparation for Defoe’s haunting […]
In 1986 Anthony Burgess published The Pianoplayers, a ribald, light-hearted story about the picaresque adventures of Ellen Henshaw and her dissolute pianoplayer father, Billy, in the silent cinemas and pubs of Manchester and Blackpool in the 1920s. Drawing on the circumstances of Burgess’s family life, the novel balances its portrayal of the poverty and deprivation […]
When visiting the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester, one of the first items of Burgess’s personal archive that can be seen is the Bösendorfer baby grand piano in the main Engine Room. This piano, which is still used for performances today, was bought by Burgess from Harrods in 1991. The following video shows him […]