Anthony Burgess is the pen name of the polymath who was born John Burgess Wilson in Manchester, England on 25 February, 1917 to a Catholic family of Irish and Scottish ancestry. His mother, Elizabeth Burgess Wilson, and his only sister, Muriel, died in the influenza epidemic the following year, and the loss of his mother had a profound effect upon Burgess's life and work.

Burgess was educated at Xaverian College and the University of Manchester, graduating with a degree in English Literature in 1940. He served in the Royal Army Medical Corps and the Army Educational Corps from 1940-1946. In 1942 he married his first wife, Llewela (Lynne) Jones, in Bournemouth while he was a sergeant and the musical director of an army dance band. For much of the Second World War, though, he was stationed in Gibraltar, where, as a member of the Army Educational Corps, he taught a course entitled 'The British Way and Purpose' to the troops.

After the war, Burgess moved with Lynne to Adderbury, in Oxfordshire, and taught t the nearby Banbury Grammar School. While there he wrote his first two novels, A Vision of Battlements, which drew upon his experiences in Gibraltar, and The Worm and the Ring, although neither were published until years later.

In 1954, after the rejection of both a collection of poems and A Vision of Battlements, he and Lynne moved to Kuala Kangsar, Malaya, where Burgess taught as an Education Officer at the Malay College for the English Colonial Service. In 1956, his first novel to be published, Time for a Tiger, appeared under the name of Anthony Burgess. He continued to balance his teaching and writing careers, completing his Malayan Trilogy with the novels The Enemy in the Blanket (1958) and Beds in the East (1959). Lynne and Burgess moved from Malaya to Brunei but in 1959, he collapsed while teaching; he returned to England with a suspected brain tumour. His prolific literary output as a novelist began at this time, as he sought to provide a financial cushion for Lynne after his death; by the end of 1962 he had published seven novels, including The Doctor is Sick, The Worm and the Ring, and A Clockwork Orange, and two translations upon which he had collaborated with Lynne. He also adopted a new disguise, publishing two novels, One Hand Clapping (1962) and Inside Mr. Enderby (1963), under the pseudonym Joseph Kell. In addition, his work as a frequent commentator for the BBC began in 1961. Clearly, Burgess was not dying.

The following decade was prolific, with Burgess publishing another five novels before the decade was out, as well as a number of critical works, including his abridged edition of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. However, in1968, his wife Lynne died of liver failure shortly after Burgess returned from discussing a script for his novel, Nothing Like the Sun, with Warner Brothers in Los Angeles. He later married Liliana (Liana) Macellari, an Italian linguist and translator. He and Liana, together with their son, Paolo Andrea (later known as Andrew), soon left England for Malta, beginning a peripatetic existence that was to last the remainder of Burgess's life. They lived in various European countries - including Rome and Bracciano, Italy and Lugano, Switzerland - before finally settling in Monaco. Throughout this period Burgess continued his prodigious output as a writer, critic, journalist, broadcaster and composer. Ultimately, he wrote over fifty books, including thirty novels, in addition to his other creative efforts. In the last twenty years of his life he also composed a tremendous amount of music, possibly stimulated in this activity by the commission and subsequent 1975 performance of his Symphony (No. 3) in C by the University of Iowa.

Anthony Burgess returned to London in the early 1990s, shortly before his death of lung cancer on 22 November 1993. His son Andrew died in London in 2002, while Liana Burgess still lives in Monaco.