A prolific and versatile writer, Burgess wrote some 60 books as well as screenplays, television scripts, and reviews. His work includes A Clockwork Orange 1962, a despairing depiction of high technology and violence set in a future London terrorized by teenage gangs, and the panoramic Earthly Powers 1980. The former was made into a notorious film by Stanley Kubrick 1971. Born in Manchester, Burgess worked as a lecturer and schoolmaster in Britain and Malaya before he began to write. His works often show an experimental approach to language - A Clockwork Orange is written in "nadsat", the imaginary argot of the teenage narrator, and his fictional biography of Shakespeare, Nothing Like the Sun 1964, is written in a mock-Elizabethan dialect. His vision has been described as bleak and pessimistic, but his work is also comic and satiric, as in his novels featuring the poet Enderby. He was born in Moss Side, Manchester. His mother, who had been a music-hall artist, died when he was still in infancy. He was educated by Jesuits at Xaverian College, and while there taught himself the piano and wrote a cello concerto and a symphony. He read English at Manchester University and then served in the army 1940-46, mainly in the Education Corps. When demobilized, he lectured for Birmingham University extramural department, then for the Ministry of Education until 1950, when he became an English master at Banbury Grammar School. His main interests however, according to his own account, were drinking and sex. In 1954 he became a senior lecturer in English at the Malayan Teachers' Training College, Khata Baru, just before the outbreak of war. There he found his true vocation. He wrote three novels 1956-59 about British and other expatriates, and the Malayans on the eve of their independence, published together as The Malayan Trilogy 1972. He worked for the Brunei Department of Education 1958-59, but his time in Southeast Asia was abruptly ended when he collapsed while teaching. An inoperable brain tumour was diagnosed and he apparently had only a year to live. He wrote five novels during that year and, back in England, kept up a steady flow of at least one book a year and a good deal of journalism. From 1968 Burgess lived abroad, in Malta, Rome, Switzerland, and Monaco, and his work became even more ambitious. Earthly Powers, a vast survey of the 20th century narrated by a fictional world-famous novelist, was short-listed for the Booker Prize. Equally ambitious was The Kingdom of the Wicked 1985, a spectacular retelling of the Acts of the Apostles. Burgess also wrote many works of literary criticism, particularly on James Joyce, as well as several on language and on music and composing. His memoirs, Little Wilson and Big God 1987 and You've Had Your Time 1990, are as exciting as his fiction and in many respects an extension of it.
