Martin Amis

Martin Amis (born August 25, 1949) is a British novelist. He is the author of some of Britain's best-known modern literature, particularly Money (1986) and London Fields (1989), and the creator of several of fiction's most memorable characters since Charles Dickens.

Later career

His best-known novels, and the ones most respected by critics, are Money, London Fields, and Time's Arrow. Time's Arrow, the autobiography of a doctor who helped torture Jews during the Holocaust, which was shortlisted for the 1991 Booker Prize, drew notice both for its unusual technique — time runs backwards during the entire novel — as well as for its topic.

Related Topics:
London Fields - Time's Arrow - Jew - The Holocaust - Booker Prize

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The unparalleled size of the advance demanded and obtained by Amis for The Information attracted what Amis described as "an Eisteddfod of hostility" from writers and critics after he left his agent of many years, Pat Kavanagh, in order to be represented by Andrew "The Jackal" Wylie. Kavanagh is married to Julian Barnes, with whom Amis had been friends for many years, but the incident caused a rift that is generally regarded to be the inspiration for The Information which features two rival authors. He has written a memoir, largely about his relationship with his famous author father, called Experience. In 2002, Amis published Koba the Dread, a book about the crimes of Stalinism and the intellectual left. The book provoked a literary controversy for his supposedly naïve and dilettante approach to the material, and for its attack on his longtime friend Christopher Hitchens, who rebuked his charges in a stinging review in The Atlantic.

Related Topics:
Eisteddfod - Stalinism - Christopher Hitchens

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In 2003, Yellow Dog was thoroughly denounced by Tibor Fischer, generating further hubbub in the media: "Yellow Dog isn't bad as in not very good or slightly disappointing. It's not-knowing-where-to-look bad. I was reading my copy on the Tube and I was terrified someone would look over my shoulder . . . It's like your favourite uncle being caught in a school playground, masturbating". Whilst the book did not sell as well as expected, it did receive decent acclaim in the literary press.

Related Topics:
Tibor Fischer - The Tube - Masturbating

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In his autobiography, Experience, he writes movingly of being reunited with a long-lost daughter - the result of an affair in the 1970s. He did not see his daughter until she was 19.

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One of his cousins, 21 year-old Lucy Partington, was a victim of Fred West. http://www.bbc.co.uk/crime/caseclosed/fredwest1.shtml

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Martin Amis has released a collection of his short stories, under the title Heavy Water, and a collection of journalism entitled The War Against Cliche.

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He lives and writes in London and Uruguay and is married, for the second time, to the writer, Isabel Fonseca.

Related Topics:
London - Uruguay

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