Martin Amis

Sir Martin Louis Amis FRSL was an English novelist, essayist, memoirist, and screenwriter. He is best known for his 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 served as Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Manchester's Centre for New Writing from 2007 until 2011. In 2008, The Times named him one of the fifty greatest British writers since 1945. Amis's work centres on the excesses of "late-capitalist" Western society, whose perceived absurdity he often satirised through grotesque caricature; he was portrayed by some literary critics as a master of what The New York Times called "the new unpleasantness". Inspired by Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov, as well as by his father Kingsley Amis, Amis himself influenced many British novelists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, including Will Self and Zadie Smith. A lifelong smoker, Amis died from oesophageal cancer at his house in the US state of Florida in May 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."