Martin Amis

Martin Amis (1949- ), British author, born in Oxford on August 25, 1949, and educated at Oxford University. Martin Louis Amis's childhood was spent in a variety of locations, as his father, the author Kingsley Amis, taught at universities in Britain and the United States. After his parents' divorce when he was 12, he attended numerous schools but showed little academic promise. However, his stepmother, the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, subsequently exposed him to the works of Jane Austen, and as a result Amis decided to prepare himself to enter a university. He graduated from Oxford in 1971 with an honours degree in English.

Martin Amis held a succession of literary positions before becoming a full-time writer. He worked in 1971 as a book reviewer for The Observer and from 1972 to 1974 as an editorial assistant and then as fiction and poetry editor at the Times Literary Supplement. From there he went to the New Statesman, where he became literary editor at the age of 27. In 1980 he returned to The Observer as a special writer.

Amis produced a succession of novels, short stories, essays, and screenplays that established his reputation as one of the wittiest satirical writers of his time. His first novel, The Rachel Papers (1973), won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1974 (an honour that his father had won for his first novel, Lucky Jim, 20 years earlier). Subsequent titles include Dead Babies (1976), Success (1978), Other People: A Mystery Story (1981), and probably his most admired novel Money: A Suicide Note (1984), a vivid, literate satire on 1980s decadence. Then came Einstein's Monsters (1987), London Fields (1989), and Time's Arrow (1991), an acclaimed work about the Nazi death camps that forsakes conventional linear narrative. The Information (1995), a story of literary rivalry and mid-life crisis, was less well received. Amis's witty, ornate, satirical style often contrasts sharply with his thematic concern for contemporary society's problems of sex, drugs, gratuitous violence, and nuclear and environmental horror.

Martin Amis’s other works include Night Train (1997), Heavy Water and Other Stories (1998), a memoir/portrait of his father, Experience (2000), and The War Against Cliché (2001), a collection of his essays and reviews. In Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (2002) Amis chronicles the horrors of Stalinism, drawing a moral equivalence between the crimes of the Soviet dictator and those of Hitler, and concludes that the period of Stalin's rule was more akin to a “black farce” than a tragedy. In the multi-stranded novel Yellow Dog (2003), a novelist undergoes a personality shift after being assaulted at a London pub. The House of Meetings (2006) is a short novel about two brothers who are incarcerated in the Soviet Gulag, and their love for the same woman. Amis’s writings on events post September 11, 2001, are collected in The Second Plane (2008). He was appointed Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Manchester in 2007.