Anthony Burgess (1917−1993)was a British novelist, critic and composer. He was also active as a librettist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, journalist, essayist, travel writer, broadcaster, translator, and educationalist.
Born in Manchester in northwest England, he lived and worked variously in Southeast Asia, the United States and Mediterranean Europe.
Burgess’s fiction includes the Malayan trilogy (The Long Day Wanes) on the dying days of Britain’s empire in the East, the Enderby quartet of comic novels about a reclusive poet and his muse, the classic speculative recreation of Shakespeare’s love-life Nothing Like the Sun, the cult exploration of the nature of evil A Clockwork Orange (1962), another dystopia The Wanting Seed (1962) and his masterpiece Earthly Powers, a panoramic saga of the 20th century.
He wrote critical studies of Joyce, Hemingway, Shakespeare and Lawrence, produced the treatises on linguistics Language Made Plain and A Mouthful of Air, and was a prolific journalist, writing in several languages. The translator and adapter of Cyrano de Bergerac, Oedipus the King, and Carmen for the stage, he scripted Jesus of Nazareth and Moses the Lawgiver for the screen, invented the prehistoric language spoken in Quest for Fire, and composed the Sinfoni Melayu, the Symphony (No. 3) in C, and the opera Blooms of Dublin.