The Anthony Burgess Society has announced a conference next year to mark the centenary of the novelist and critic to whom their organization is dedicated. The conference will be held on 3-5 July 2017 in Manchester, which was Burgess’s home for many years, and the theme is Anthony Burgess: Life, Work and Reputation. The society has called for papers on this broad topic but has defined it somewhat in its announcement:
The conference aims to investigate Burgess’s relationships with other writers, film-makers, artists, musicians and cultural movements of his time. Among his network of friends and associates were (for example) Kingsley Amis, William Boyd, Christine Brooke-Rose, A.S. Byatt, Angela Carter, Shirley Conran, Umberto Eco, Graham Greene, Joseph Heller, B.S. Johnson, Erica Jong, Olivia Manning, George Orwell, Eric Partridge, Thomas Pynchon, Adrienne Rich, Paul Scott, Muriel Spark, Dylan Thomas, Gore Vidal and Evelyn Waugh. As a cultural critic, his reviews took in most of the prominent writers of his time. Burgess also collaborated with visual artists such as David Hockney, the Quay Brothers, Joe Tilson, Fulvio Testa, David Robinson, Edward Pagram and others. Papers which examine the influence of Burgess on international writers of subsequent generations are also encouraged.
Burgess is best known for his novel A Clockwork Orange which was made into a now classic film by Stanley Kubrick. Because the society’s previous conference was focussed on that work, however, papers on it are not encouraged. Any other works by Burgess may be considered as eligible topics. Burgess wrote several essays about Waugh and reviews of his books (including A Little Learning, A Little Order and the Amory edition of his letters). His review of Waugh’s autobiography is reproduced in Evelyn Waugh: The Cultural Heritage.
UPDATE (9 October 2016): David Lull has kindly provided a link to Anthony Burgess’s review of A Little Learning which originally appeared in Encounter Magazine.
