Liana Burgess

Liana Burgess (born Liliana Macellari, September 25, 1929 – December 3, 2007) was an Italian translator and literary agent who was the second wife of English writer Anthony Burgess. Burgess and Macellari had embarked on an affair while Burgess was married to his first wife, and Macellari gave birth to a son nine months after their meeting. The couple became tax exiles in the late 1960s, living in Malta and Italy, and spent several years in the United States. The couple finally settled in Monaco. Macellari played an important role in Burgess's later literary career, negotiating film rights and acting as his European literary agent, and translating his novels.

Macellari was born in Porto Civitanova, Italy, in 1929. Her mother was an amateur poet and artist, Contessa Maria Lucrezia Pasi della Pergola, and her father was Gilberto Macellari, a photographer and actor. Her father died in the Second World War. Macellari had a sister who was later killed in a mountaineering accident. Macellari learnt the English language by reading the novelist Henry James.

Macellari studied at the University of Bologna and the University of Paris and was the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship which enabled her to study literature in the United States, at Mount Holyoke College. Shortly after her move to America, Macellari met and married Benjamin Johnson, an African-American translator of Italo Svevo. Shortly after their marriage the couple separated and were finally divorced in 1967.

After moving to Rome in the late 1950s Macellari founded a theatre company and after having an affair with Englishman Roy Halliday, moved to London with him. Halliday later drowned when sailing in the Atlantic ocean.

It was while in Rome that Macellari started her Italian-language translation of Lawrence Durrell's fiction tetralogy The Alexandria Quartet. Macellari also translated James Joyce's Finnegans Wake.

In 1963 Macellari was tasked with creating a report on new English fiction for the Bompiani Literary Almanac, and in the course of her research, enthusiastically wrote to the authors of the novels A Clockwork Orange and Inside Mr. Enderby. Burgess was the author of both novels, having published Inside Mr. Enderby with the pseudonym of Joseph Kell. Macellari and Burgess met for lunch and began an affair, though Burgess was already married. Burgess was unhappily married to Llewela (Lynne) Isherwood Jones, who suffered from alcoholism, and Burgess apparently refused to leave her due to the offence he felt would be caused to George Dwyer, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Leeds, who was his cousin.

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