46 Facts About Martin Amis

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

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 portrayed by some literary critics as a master of what The New York Times called "the new unpleasantness".

Martin Amis was inspired by Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov, as well as by his father Kingsley Amis.

Martin Amis influenced many British novelists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, including Will Self and Zadie Smith.

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

Martin Amis's father, novelist 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's 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.

Martin Amis attended a number of schools in the 1950s and 1960s, including an international school in Mallorca, 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's A High Wind in Jamaica.

Martin Amis's father said Amis was not a bookish child and "read nothing but science fiction till he was fifteen or sixteen".

Martin 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.

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.

The film was far from a critical success, but Martin Amis was able to draw on the experience for his fifth novel, Money, published in 1984.

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 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.

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

The new novel took some considerable time to write: in 2008, Martin Amis made the "terrible decision" to abandon his first version and a much-different Pregnant Widow was not published until 2010.

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".

In 2010, Martin Amis was named GQ writer of the year.

The novel is centred on the lives of Desmond Pepperdine and his uncle Lionel Asbo, a voracious lout and persistent convict; for the benefit of his US readers, Martin Amis explained the origin of the latter's surname in an interview with NPR.

Much to the interest of the press, Martin Amis announced that the character of Lionel Asbo's eventual girlfriend, the ambitious glamour model and poet "Threnody", had been created to honour the British celebrity Jordan, whom he had a few years earlier summed up as "two bags of silicone".

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 at the University of Manchester, where he 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 the University of Manchester'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 married the American academic Antonia Phillips in 1984 and they had two sons together.

Martin Amis became a grandfather in 2008; he later described his new status as "like getting a telegram from the mortuary".

In late 2010, Martin Amis bought a brownstone residence in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, US, although it was uncertain 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, United States.

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

Martin Amis was knighted in the 2023 King's Birthday Honours for services to literature, with the knighthood being backdated to the day before his death.

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

Martin Amis aroused a new controversy in 2010 with his comments regarding euthanasia during an interview, when he said that he thought Britain faced a "civil war" between the young and the elderly in society within 10 or 15 years, and called for public euthanasia "booths".

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".