40 Facts About Martin Amis

Martin Louis Amis was an English novelist, essayist, memoirist, and screenwriter.

Martin Amis is best known for his novels Money and London Fields.

Martin Amis received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his memoir Experience and was twice listed for the Booker Prize.

Martin Amis was born on 25 August 1949 at Radcliffe Maternity Hospital in Oxford, England.

Martin Amis's father, noted English novelist Sir Kingsley Amis, was the son of a mustard manufacturer's clerk from Clapham, London; his mother, Kingston upon Thames-born Hilary Ann Bardwell, was the daughter of a Ministry of Agriculture civil servant.

Martin Amis had an older brother, Philip; his younger sister, Sally, died in 2000.

Martin Amis's parents married in 1948 in Oxford and divorced when Amis was 12.

Martin Amis attended a number of schools in the 1950s and 1960s including Bishop Gore School in Swansea, and Cambridgeshire High School for Boys, where he was described by one headmaster as "unusually unpromising".

In 1965, at the age of 15, Martin Amis played John Thornton in the film version of Richard Hughes' A High Wind in Jamaica.

Martin Amis claimed to have 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.

Martin Amis 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".

Martin Amis found an entry-level job at The Times Literary Supplement by the summer of 1972.

Martin Amis's 1997 offering, the short novel Night Train, is narrated by Mike Hoolihan, a tough woman detective with a man's name.

In 2000 Martin Amis published the memoir Experience, largely concerned with the relationship between the author and his father, the novelist Kingsley Martin Amis.

Martin Amis describes his reunion with his daughter, Delilah Seale, resulting from an affair in the 1970s, whom he did not see until she was 19.

Martin Amis discusses, at length, the murder of his cousin Lucy Partington by Fred West when she was 21.

In 2002 Martin Amis published Koba the Dread, a devastating history of the crimes of Lenin and Stalin, and the denial that they received from many writers and academics in the West.

In 2003 Martin Amis published Yellow Dog, his first novel in six years.

Martin Amis was unrepentant about the novel and its reaction, calling Yellow Dog "among my best three".

In September 2006, upon his return from Uruguay, Martin Amis published his eleventh novel.

Martin Amis said he started to write the novel autobiographically, but then concluded that real life was too different from fiction and difficult to drum into novel shape, so he had to rethink the form.

The story is set in a castle owned by a cheese tycoon in Campania, Italy, where Keith Nearing, a 20-year-old English literature student; his girlfriend, Lily; and her friend, Scheherazade, are on holiday during the hot summer of 1970, the year that Martin Amis says "something was changing in the world of men and women".

Much to the interest of the press, Martin Amis based the character of Lionel Asbo's eventual girlfriend, the ambitious glamour model and poet "Threnody", on the British celebrity Jordan.

The second project, a new untitled novel which Martin Amis was working on, was an autobiographical novel about three key literary figures in his life: the poet Philip Larkin, American novelist Saul Bellow, and noted public intellectual Christopher Hitchens.

Martin Amis released two collections of short stories and five volumes of collected journalism and criticism.

Martin Amis regularly appeared on television and radio discussion and debate programmes and contributed book reviews and articles to newspapers.

In February 2007, Martin Amis was appointed as a professor of creative writing at The Manchester Centre for New Writing in the University of Manchester, and started in September 2007.

Martin Amis ran postgraduate seminars, and participated in four public events each year, including a two-week summer school.

In January 2011, it was announced that Martin Amis would be stepping down from his university position at the end of the current academic year.

Martin Amis was succeeded in this position by the Irish writer Colm Toibin in September 2011.

From October 2007 to July 2011, at Manchester University's Whitworth Hall and Cosmo Rodewald Concert Hall, Martin Amis regularly engaged in public discussions with other experts on literature and various topics.

Martin Amis returned to Britain in September 2006 after living in Uruguay for two and a half years with his second wife, the writer Isabel Fonseca, and their two young daughters.

Martin Amis became a grandfather in 2008, when his daughter Delilah gave birth to a son.

In late 2010 Martin Amis bought a brownstone residence in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, US, although it was unclear how much time he would be spending there.

In 2012, Martin Amis wrote in The New Republic that he was "moving house" from Camden Town in London to Cobble Hill.

Martin Amis had a residence in Lake Worth Beach, Florida, US.

Martin Amis died from oesophageal cancer at his home in Florida on 19 May 2023.

Martin Amis was a lifelong smoker, as was his friend Christopher Hitchens, who died due to complications from the same form of cancer.

In 2015, Martin Amis criticised Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn in an article for the Sunday Times, describing him as "humourless" and "under-educated".

In 2006, Martin Amis said that "agnostic is the only respectable position, simply because our ignorance of the universe is so vast" that atheism is "premature".