Anthony Burgess

Anthony Burgess (1917-1993) was an English novelist, critic, and composer whose restless versatility took him from colonial teaching posts in Malaya and Brunei to full-time writing after 1959. He is best known for A Clockwork Orange (1962), a dystopian novel of youth violence and free will narrated in the invented slang Nadsat, later filmed by Stanley Kubrick. Burgess's other fiction ranges from the Malayan Trilogy to the four Enderby novels, following a hapless poet, and speculative works such as The Wanting Seed and 1985. He also wrote under the pen name Joseph Kell. Nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature and shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Earthly Powers (1980), Burgess considered himself equally a composer, producing more than 250 musical works alongside his fiction, criticism, and screenplays. He spent much of his later life abroad in tax exile.