Anthony Burgess was born on 25 February 1917. On the occasion of his 108th birthday, we look forward to future publications and other forthcoming Burgess-related events. It was Amol Rajan, the presenter of University Challenge and the Today programme on BBC Radio 4, who spoke recently of ‘the great, late Anthony Burgess.’ Of his lateness […]
Translating Burgess / Burgess Translating We are pleased to invite applications for a funded PhD studentship, which will focus on translations of Burgess’s novels, and the work of Anthony and Liana Burgess as literary translators. The successful candidate will be jointly supervised by University of Manchester and the International Anthony Burgess Foundation. The deadline for […]
Anthony Burgess died in London on 22 November 1993. He was 76 years old and had been diagnosed with lung cancer just over a year previously. The final phase of his life was characterised by intense creative production, in a variety of forms. The publication of a long novel about the rediscovery of the sword […]
The latest publication to emerge from the Burgess Foundation’s archive of manuscripts is Chatsky and Miser, Miser! In these two stage plays, published for the first time by Salamander Street, Burgess adapts and revives major monuments of French and Russian theatre: The Miser by Molière and the Russian comedy Chatsky by Alexander Griboyedov. Chatsky, to […]
This essay was written in 1983, when Burgess’s verse translation of Cyrano de Bergerac was performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Barbican Theatre in London, with Derek Jacobi in the leading role. The production was a great success: Michael Billington, the long-standing theatre critic of the Guardian, wrote about the ‘bold, emotionally unashamed’ […]
Anthony Burgess’s second commission from Michael Langham, the artistic director of the Tyrone Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, was an adaptation of Oedipus the King by Sophocles. He had recently completed the novel MF, whose incest theme also reflected Burgess’s interest in Freud and Oedipus. He had little knowledge of Greek and a hazy knowledge of ancient […]
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. As the typescript of Earthly Powers approached the end of its decade-long gestation in 1979, there was a significant hole in the book. […]
Looking back on the life and work of Llewela Jones (1920-1968). Anthony Burgess’s first wife, born Llewela Jones and later known as Lynne, would have celebrated her 100th birthday on 24 November 2020. Many readers are familiar with the portrait of her given by Burgess in his two volumes of autobiography, Little Wilson and Big […]
Andrew Biswell: How to read Earthly Powers ‘The ideal reader of my books,’ Anthony Burgess told John Cullinan of the Paris Review in 1973, ‘is a lapsed Catholic and failed musician, short-sighted, colour-blind, auditorily biased, who has read the books that I have read. He should also be about my age.’ Readers who lack those […]