This episode of the Burgess Foundation Podcast is the first in an occasional series in which we speak to the current translators of Anthony Burgess’s novels to find out the delights and challenges involved in making them understandable in different languages and cultures. Our first guest in this series is Ludger Tolksdorf, who has spent […]

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 […]

When Anthony Burgess moved to Malaya, he needed to learn the language. Take a look at the books that helped his studies, and find out how we’re preserving those books. On 5 August 1954, Burgess set sail from Southampton with his first wife, Lynne, and their cat, Lalage, ready to begin a new life as […]

This picture, taken in Chiswick, shows Burgess with his border collie, Haji. Burgess and his first wife Lynne acquired their dog when they moved to Etchingham in 1960, where they also had a cat and kittens. According to Burgess, Haji was not the perfect pet: ‘He was crafty, disobedient, and ignorant of the sexual life, […]

Our new exhibition examines Anthony Burgess’s experiences in Malaya in the 1950s, where he worked as a teacher at the Malay College in Kuala Kangsar and at the Malayan Teachers’ Training College at Kota Bharu in the district of Kelantan. As a fluent speaker of Malay and Chinese, Burgess was able to experience the colonial […]

On the publication of Beds In The East, 1959.