Anthony Burgess

Biography

John Anthony Burgess Wilson, known as Anthony Burgess (1917-1993), was an English writer and composer whose output ranged from novels and criticism to plays, librettos and music. He is best remembered for A Clockwork Orange, a dystopian satire published in 1962 and filmed by Stanley Kubrick in 1971. Alongside his fiction he worked as a screenwriter for film and television in the 1970s and 1980s, and he composed more than 250 musical works, although his greatest success came as a writer.

Born in Harpurhey, a suburb of Manchester, to Irish Catholic parents, he lost his mother and sister to the 1918 influenza pandemic, a loss that shaped his later fiction. He was raised by an aunt and then by his father and stepmother, who ran a tobacconist and off-licence business. He attended Catholic schools and the Xaverian College, where he began writing poems and stories. A radio broadcast of Debussy's Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune turned him toward music, and he taught himself the piano.

He read English at the University of Manchester, graduating in 1940 with a thesis on Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. That year he joined the British Army, serving in Gibraltar, where he lectured troops. After the war he taught in England and, from 1954, worked as an education officer in Malaya and Brunei. In 1959 he was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour and given a bleak prognosis. To secure his wife's income, he turned to writing full time, and he later claimed to have produced five and a half novels in a single year. The half became A Clockwork Orange, his most famous book.

He went on to publish dozens of works, including the Enderby novels and Earthly Powers, as well as studies of Joyce, Shakespeare, Hemingway and Lawrence and criticism for The Observer and The Guardian. For the screen he wrote Moses the Lawgiver (1974), Jesus of Nazareth (1977) and A.D. (1985), and he devised the invented Stone Age language for Quest for Fire (1981). He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1973. His reputation rests largely on A Clockwork Orange, and Kubrick's film follows the American edition of the novel, which omits the final chapter the author regarded as essential.

Key films

• A Clockwork Orange (1971), directed by Stanley Kubrick, adapted from Burgess's 1962 novel.
• Moses the Lawgiver (1974), directed by Gianfranco De Bosio, written in part by Burgess.
• Jesus of Nazareth (1977), directed by Franco Zeffirelli, a television miniseries for which Burgess wrote the screenplay.
• Quest for Fire (1981), directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, for which Burgess devised the prehistoric language.