Sir Martin Louis Amis (25 August 1949 – 19 May 2023) was an English novelist, essayist, memoirist, screenwriter and critic. He is best known for his novels Money (1984) and London Fields (1989). He received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his memoir Experience and was twice listed for the Booker Prize (shortlisted in 1991 for Time's Arrow and longlisted in 2003 for Yellow Dog). Amis was a professor of creative writing at the University of Manchester's Centre for New Writing from 2007 until 2011. In 2008, The Times named him one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.
Amis's work centres on the excesses of late capitalist Western society, whose perceived absurdity he often satirised through grotesque caricature. He was portrayed by some literary critics as a master of what The New York Times called "the new unpleasantness.” He was inspired by Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov, as well as by his father Kingsley Amis. Amis influenced many British novelists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, including Will Self and Zadie Smith.
His stylistic innovations – marked by ironic detachment, baroque sentence structures, and postmodern narrative experimentation – shaped a generation of British writers. His novels are often credited with revitalizing the comic novel in late 20th-century Britain.
Amis died from oesophageal cancer at his house in Florida in 2023. A. O. Scott wrote in The New York Times after his death: "To come of reading age in the last three decades of the 20th century – from the oil embargo through the fall of the Berlin Wall, all the way to 9/11 – was to live, it now seems clear, in the Amis Era."
Early life and education
Amis was born on 25 August 1949 at Radcliffe Maternity Hospital in Oxford, England. His father, novelist Kingsley Amis, was the son of a mustard manufacturer's clerk from Clapham, London; was the daughter of a Ministry of Agriculture civil servant. He had an elder brother, Philip; his younger sister, Sally – for whose birth Philip Larkin composed "Born Yesterday" – died in 2000 at the age of 46. His parents married in 1948 in Oxford and divorced when Amis was 12 years old; following the separation, Hilly and the children decamped to Mallorca, Spain, where they stayed for a while with Robert Graves.
Amis attended a number of schools in the 1950s and 1960s, including an international school in Mallorca,
In 1965, at the age of 15, Amis played John Thornton in the film version of Richard Hughes's A High Wind in Jamaica. His father said Amis was not a bookish child and "read nothing but science fiction till he was fifteen or sixteen". Amis said he had read little more than comic books until his stepmother, the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, introduced him to Jane Austen, whom he often named as his earliest influence. He graduated from Exeter College, Oxford, with a congratulatory first in English, "the sort where you are called in for a viva and the examiners tell you how much they enjoyed reading your papers".
After graduating from Oxford in 1971, Amis wrote reviews of science-fiction novels under the nom de plume "Henry Tilney" (a nod to Austen) in a column for The Observer. Instead he continued to work on a follow-up full novel that he had started working on in 2003: