John Anthony Burgess Wilson was born in Manchester into a Catholic middle-class family. His father was a cashier and pub pianist. his mother died in the flu pandemic of 1919. He studied at Xaverian College and Manchester University, where he read English language and literature, graduating in 1940. In 1942 he married Llwela Isherwood Jones, who died of alcoholic cirrhosis in 1968.

In 1959 Burgess devoted himself entirely to writing. Between years 1960 and 1964 Burgess wrote eleven novels. 'THE WANTING SEED' (1962) depicted an overpopulated England of the future, caught up in the alternating cycles of libertarianism and totalitarianism. In 1962 appeared his most famous science fiction fable, a clockwork orange, which made him famous as a satirical novelist, and which was filmed by Stanley Kubrick in the 1970s.

Burgess published in the 1970s and 1980s some thirty books, among them 'THE EARTHLY POWERS' (1980), which is considered by many critics Burgess's finest novel. It was narrated by an 81-year-old successful, homosexual writer, Kenneth Toomey, a figure loosely based on W. Somerset Maugham. The novel also had many jokes about other major literary figures. 1985 [book] is an attempt at updating 1984 [book] by Orwell. 'THE KINGDOM OF THE WICKED' (1985) takes the first years of Christianity as its subject.