Photo:
Isabel Fonseca
Link to Author's WebsiteMartin Amis
Photo:
Isabel Fonseca
Link to Author's Website
| Biography Martin Amis, son of writer Kingsley Amis (Lucky Jim etc), was born Martin Louis Amis in Cardiff on August 25, 1949. He is the middle of three children (an older brother Philip and younger sister, Sally, who died in 2000). His parents, Hilary (Hilly) and Kingsley, divorced when he was twelve. He was educated in schools in Wales, England, Spain and the USA (while his father lectured at Princeton), and graduated from Exeter College, Oxford, with First Class Honours in English. His first novel, The Rachel Papers, was published in 1973 while he was working an editorial assistant at the Times Literary Supplement. It won a Somerset Maugham Award in 1974. In 1975 he published Dead Babies, followed by Success in 1978, written while he was Literary Editor of the New Statesman (1977-79). His work has been heavily influenced by American fiction, especially the work of Philip Roth, John Updike and Saul Bellow, and also by Russian writers such as Vladimir Nabokov. He is considered to be one of the most influential and innovative voices in contemporary British fiction, and is sometimes grouped with other British-based writers who emerged in the 1980s such as Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes. He is a regular contributor to many newspapers, magazines and journals, including the Sunday Times, The Observer, the Times Literary Supplement and the New York Times. In 1984 he married Antonia Phillips, with whom he has two sons, Louis (1985) and Jacob (1986). Their marriage broke down in 1993 and in 1996 he married Isabel Fonseca, with whom he has two daughters, Fernanda (1997) and Clio (1999). He has another daughter who he met for the first time in 1996, Delilah Seale (born ~1975), from an affair with Lamorna Heath.
He lives in London and Uruguay, with his wife and daughters.
|
| This biography was last updated on 02/05/2007. |
http://www.bookbrowse.com/biographies/index.cfm?author_number=1414