Sir Martin Amis | |
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![]() Amis in 2014 | |
Born | Martin Louis Amis 25 August 1949 Oxford, England |
Died | 19 May 2023 Lake Worth Beach, Florida, US | (aged 73)
Pen name | Henry Tilney |
Alma mater | Exeter College, Oxford |
Notable works |
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Notable awards | Knight Bachelor 2023 |
Spouse |
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Children | 5 |
Parents | |
Relatives | Sally Amis (sister) |
Sir Martin Louis Amis FRSL[1] (25 August 1949 – 19 May 2023) was an English writer best known for 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.
Amis's work centres on the excesses of "late-capitalist" Western society, whose perceived absurdity he often satirised through grotesque caricature. 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.
A life-long smoker, Amis died from oesophageal cancer at his house in the US state of Florida in 2023. The New York Times wrote 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."[2]