Anthony Burgess

Anthony Burgess was an English writer, composer, and critic, born John Anthony Burgess Wilson in Manchester in 1917. Raised Catholic after the early death of his mother, he studied English literature at the University of Manchester and served in the British Army during the Second World War before working as a teacher and education officer in Malaya and Brunei.

Burgess turned to writing full-time after a misdiagnosis of a brain tumor in 1959 led doctors to give him a year to live; determined to provide for his wife, he wrote several novels in quick succession. He survived, and went on to a prolific career producing more than thirty novels along with criticism, screenplays, and musical compositions.

His most famous work, A Clockwork Orange, published in 1962, is a dystopian novel narrated in an invented slang called Nadsat, exploring free will, violence, and the morality of state control. Though Burgess often felt overshadowed by Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation, the novel secured his lasting reputation. His other notable works include the Enderby novels and Earthly Powers.

A polymath fluent in several languages and a serious composer who wrote symphonies and other works, Burgess brought linguistic invention and intellectual ambition to everything he wrote. He died in London in 1993, remembered as one of the most inventive and wide-ranging British writers of the twentieth century.