When Jorge Luis Borges met Anthony Burgess for the first time, Borges was 77 years old and at the height of his international fame. He had been blind for 23 years. Burgess had just turned sixty, and was much in demand as a screenwriter and public speaker. The venue for their historic meeting was the […]

Ernest Hemingway died on 2 July 1961. Anthony Burgess was in Leningrad when he heard the news, gathering the material for Honey for the Bears and A Clockwork Orange. In a later review of A.E. Hotchner’s biography of Hemingway, reprinted in Urgent Copy (1968), Burgess recalled: ‘Many young Russians I drank with asked me, as […]

Perfect? Masterly? Sub-literary and contrived? We look at Anthony Burgess’s love-hate relationship with F. Scott Fitzgerald. 2020 marks the hundredth anniversary of the publication of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s debut novel, This Side of Paradise, and eighty years since his death in 1940 at the age of 44. He is among the authors who Burgess found […]

I knew Anthony Burgess, in a passing sort of way, first, when he was the writer-in-residence at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill in 1969-70. I had just begun my doctoral studies in English and lived with a number of other Jesuits who were pursuing degrees at either Chapel Hill or nearby Duke […]

The Burgess Foundation’s archive includes a collection of audio recordings and films which exist in media such as Super 8, VHS and reel-to-reel audio tape. While some of this material has been digitised to allow easier access for researchers, other parts of the collection are still in their original formats. One intriguing item is a […]

Burgess’s inscribed copy of Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here (1935) displays the tag-line ‘The Ultimate Triumph of the Silent Majority’, something that indicates the novel’s relevance today. Burgess says in The Novel Now (1967), the book proves that ‘America can have its own bad dreams’, with antagonist Senator ‘Buzz’ Windrip securing presidential victory, dissolving […]