Biswell equals Burgess's achievement

MANCHESTER literary great Anthony Burgess is one of an illustrious list of winners of the Portico Prize for Literature for Any Old Iron in 1989.

Now a book about the great man has become the 2006 winner of the Portico.

Andrew Biswell’s The Real Life of Anthony Burgess (Picador, 2005) was awarded the non-fiction part of the prize at a glittering ceremony at the Midland Hotel on November 8.

Biswell, a leading scholar of the Manchester-born writer (1917-1993) of A Clockwork Orange and Earthly Powers is Director of The Writing School at MMU. His work was described as "the first Burgess biography of any consequence" and named one of the Books of the Year in The Guardian by William Boyd.

The £3,000 Portico Prize, named after Manchester’s Portico Library and Gallery, is the only book prize exclusively for books about or set in the North West of England.

In 2004, another MMU academic, Terry Wyke, of the Department of History and Economic History won for his Public Sculpture in Greater Manchester.