m a r t i n a m i s : b i o g .
Martin Amis was born in
Oxford in 1949, the son of the writer
Kingsley Amis.
He was educated in schools in Britain, Spain and the USA, and graduated from
Exeter College, Oxford, with First Class Honours in English. He wrote and
published his first novel, The Rachel Papers (1973), while working as an
editorial assistant at the Times Literary Supplement. The novel won a
Somerset Maugham Award in 1974 and was followed by Dead Babies in 1975.
He was Literary Editor of the New Statesman between 1977 and 1979,
publishing his third novel, Success, in 1978.
Regarded by many critics as one of the most influential and innovative voices in
contemporary British fiction, Amis is often grouped with the generation of
British-based novelists that emerged during the 1980s and included Salman
Rushdie, Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes. His work has been heavily influenced by
American fiction, especially the work of Philip Roth, John Updike and Saul
Bellow. A loose trilogy of novels set in London begins with Money: A Suicide
Note (1984), a satire of Thatcherite amorality and greed, continues with
London Fields (1989), and concludes with The Information (1995), a
tale of literary rivalry. Time's Arrow (1991), was shortlisted for the
Booker Prize for Fiction.
More recent books include Night Train (1997), a pastiche of American
detective fiction, an acclaimed volume of autobiography, Experience
(2000) - winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize - and Koba the Dread,
a non-fiction work about communism in the twentieth century (2002). A new work
of fiction, Yellow Dog, is published in
September 2003.
Amis is also the author of three collections of essays, The
Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (1986), Visiting Mrs Nabokov
and Other Excursions (1993), and The War Against Cliché (2001), which
includes essays and book reviews, as well as two collections of short stories,
Einstein's Monsters (1987), and Heavy Water and Other Stories
(1998).
He is a regular contributor to numerous newspapers, magazines and journals,
including the Sunday Times, The Observer, the Times Literary
Supplement and the New York Times. He was awarded an honorary LittD
by the University of East Anglia in 2000.
Martin Amis lives in London.