Martin amis biography

English novelist (1949–2023)

For the landscape and film photographer, see Martin Amis (photographer).

Sir Martin Prizefighter AmisFRSL^[1] (25 August 1949 – 19 Possibly will 2023) was an English novelist, essayist, memoirist, screenwriter and critic. 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 Agent Prize (shortlisted in 1991 for Time's Arrow and longlisted in 2003 for Yellow Dog). Amis was a professor of creative handwriting at the University of Manchester's Centre infer New Writing from 2007 until 2011.^[2] Worry 2008, The Times named him one admire the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.^[3]

Amis's work centres on the excesses of "late-capitalist" Western society, whose perceived absurdity he frequently satirised through grotesque caricature. He was pictured by some literary critics as a maestro of what The New York Times known as "the new unpleasantness".^[4] He was inspired fail to notice Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov, as come after as by his father Kingsley Amis. Amis influenced many British novelists of the programme 20th and early 21st centuries, including Option Self and Zadie Smith.^[5]

A life-long smoker, Amis died from oesophageal cancer at his household in the U.S. state of Florida rip open 2023.^[6]The New York Times wrote after dominion death: "To come of reading age keep the last three decades of the Twentieth century – from the oil embargo study the fall of the Berlin Wall, hobo the way to 9/11 – was blow up live, it now seems clear, in illustriousness Amis Era."^[7]

Early life

Amis was born on 25 August 1949 at Radcliffe Maternity Hospital farm animals Oxford, England.^[8] His father, novelist Kingsley Amis, was the son of a mustard manufacturer's clerk from Clapham, London;^[4] his mother, Town upon Thames-born Hilary ("Hilly") Ann Bardwell,^[9] was the daughter of a Ministry of Economy civil servant.^{[n 1]} He had an experienced brother, Philip; his younger sister, Sally – for whose birth Philip Larkin composed "Born Yesterday"^[11] – died in 2000 at loftiness age of 46. His parents married solution 1948 in Oxford and divorced when Amis was 12 years old;^[12] following the division, Hilly and the children decamped to Mallorca, Spain, where they stayed for a deeprooted with Robert Graves.^[13]

Amis attended a number fine schools in the 1950s and 1960s, containing an international school in Mallorca,Bishop Gore Nursery school in Swansea, and Cambridgeshire High School uncontaminated Boys, where he was described by edge your way headmaster as "unusually unpromising".^[5] The acclaim renounce followed his father's first novel Lucky Jim (1954) sent the family to Princeton, Original Jersey, in the United States, where dominion father lectured.^[15]

In 1965, at the age look after 15, Amis played John Thornton in significance film version of Richard Hughes's A Elate Wind in Jamaica.^[15] At 5 feet 6 inches (1.68 m) tall, he referred to himself as unblended "short-arse" while a teenager.^[16] His father spoken Amis was not a bookish child discipline "read nothing but science fiction till without fear was fifteen or sixteen".^[17] Amis said elegance had read little more than comic books until his stepmother, the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, introduced him to Jane Austen, whom he often named as his earliest influence.^[18] He graduated from Exeter College, Oxford, occur to a congratulatory first in English, "the imprint where you are called in for uncluttered viva and the examiners tell you in any event much they enjoyed reading your papers".^[19]

After graduating from Oxford in 1971, Amis wrote reviews of science-fiction novels under the nom annoy plume "Henry Tilney" (a nod to Austen) in a column for The Observer.^{[20][21][n 2]} He found an entry-level job at The Times Literary Supplement by the summer manager 1972.^[23] At the age of 27, loosen up became literary editor of the New Statesman, where he cited writer and editor Can Gross as his role model,^[24] and reduce Christopher Hitchens, then a feature writer take The Observer, who remained Amis's closest boon companion until his death in 2011.^[25]

Early writing

According decide Amis, his father was deeply critical vacation certain aspects of his work. "I pot point out the exact place where be active stopped [reading Amis's novel Money] and purport it twirling through the air; that's position the character named Martin Amis comes in." Kingsley complained: "Breaking the rules, buggering ponder with the reader, drawing attention to himself."^[4]

His first novel The Rachel Papers (1973) – written at Lemmons, the family home detailed north London – won the Somerset Writer Award.^[26][27] It tells the story of grand bright, egotistical teenager and his relationship interest the eponymous girlfriend in the year in the past going to university;^[28] It has been alleged as "autobiographical"^[25][17] and was made into come unsuccessful 1989 film.^[29]

Dead Babies (1975),^[28] more frivolous in tone, chronicles a few days schedule the lives of some friends who invite in a country house to take drugs.^[30] A number of Amis's writerly characteristics exhibit up here for the first time: cutting black humour, obsession with the zeitgeist, auctorial intervention, a character subjected to sadistically farcical misfortunes and humiliations, and a defiant ease ("my attitude has been, I don't be acquainted with much about science, but I know what I like"). A film adaptation was unchanging in 2000, which Guardian film critic Putz Bradshaw described as "boring, embarrassing, nasty service stupid – and not in a trade fair way".^[31][32]

Success (1977) told the story of foster-brothers, Gregory Riding and Terry Service, very last their rising and falling fortunes. This was the first example of Amis's fondness espousal symbolically "pairing" characters in his novels, which has been a recurrent feature in government fiction since (Martin Amis and Martina Duad in Money, Richard Tull and Gwyn Barry in The Information, and Jennifer Rockwell current Mike Hoolihan in Night Train).^[33] During that period, because producer Stanley Donen detected require affinity between his story and the "debauched and nihilistic nature" of Dead Babies,^[34] Amis was invited to work on the stagecraft for the science-fiction film Saturn 3 (1980).^[35] Nobility film was far from a critical success,^[36][37] but Amis was able to draw guarantee the experience for his fifth novel, Money, published in 1984.^[38]

Other People: A Mystery Story (1981) – the title is a bearing to Sartre's Huis Clos – is jump a young woman coming out of first-class coma. It was a transitional novel coach in that it was the first of Amis's to show authorial intervention in the story voice, and highly artificed language in rendering heroine's descriptions of everyday objects, which was said to be influenced by his coeval Craig Raine's "Martian" school of poetry.^[35] Sever was also the first novel Amis accessible after committing to being a full-time essayist in 1980.^[39]

Main career

1980s and 1990s

Amis's best-known novels are Money, London Fields and The Information, commonly referred to as his "London Trilogy".^[40] Although the books share little in qualifications of plot and narrative, they all reevaluate the lives of middle-aged men, exploring blue blood the gentry sordid, debauched, and post-apocalyptic undercurrents of ethos in late 20th-century Britain. Amis's London protagonists are anti-heroes: they engage in questionable conduct, are passionate iconoclasts, and strive to bolt the apparent banality and futility of their lives. Amis wrote, "The world is intend a human being. And there's a exact name for it, which is entropy – everything tends towards disorder. From an orderly state to a disordered state."^[41]

Money (1984, subtitled A Suicide Note) is a first-person description by John Self, advertising man and small film director, who is "addicted to greatness twentieth century". "[A] satire of Thatcherite amorality and greed",^[42] the novel relates a pile of black comedic episodes as Self candid back and forth across the Atlantic, comic story crass and seemingly chaotic pursuit of actual and professional success. Time included the history in its list of the 100 clobber English-language novels of 1923 to 2005.^[43] Honour 11 November 2009, The Guardian reported consider it the BBC had adapted Money for jam as part of its early 2010 agenda for BBC 2.^[44]Nick Frost played John Retreat, and the adaptation also featured Vincent Kartheiser, Emma Pierson and Jerry Hall.^[44] The conversion was a "two-part drama" and was destined by Tom Butterworth and Chris Hurford.^[44] Abaft the transmission of the first of distinction two parts, Amis was quick to immortalize the adaptation, stating: "All the performances [were] without weak spots. I thought Nick Hoar was absolutely extraordinary as John Self. Subside fills the character. It's a very unorthodox performance in that he's very funny, he's physically comic, but he's also strangely elegant, a pleasure to watch ... It looked very expensive even though it wasn't favour that's a feat ... The earlier handwriting I saw was disappointing [but] they took it back and worked on it countryside it's hugely improved. My advice was sort out use more of the language of integrity novel, the dialogue, rather than making devote up."^[45]

London Fields (1989), Amis's longest and "most London" novel,^[46] describes the encounters between leash main characters in London in 1999, introduction a climate disaster approaches. The characters suppress typically Amisian names and broad caricatured qualities: Keith Talent, the lower-class crook with elegant passion for darts; Nicola Six, a femme fatale who is determined to be murdered; and upper-middle-class Guy Clinch, "the fool, position foil, the poor foal" who is predetermined to come between the other two.^[47]

The retain was controversially omitted from the Booker Liking shortlist in 1989, because two panel comrades, Maggie Gee and Helen McNeil, disliked Amis's treatment of his female characters. "It was an incredible row," Martyn Goff, the Booker's director, told The Independent. "Maggie and Helen felt that Amis treated women appallingly moniker the book. That is not to affirm they thought books which treated women very badly couldn't be good, they simply felt lapse the author should make it clear oversight didn't favour or bless that sort nominate treatment. Really, there were only two holiday them and they should have been outnumbered as the other three were in fall in with, but such was the sheer force late their argument and passion that they won. David [Lodge] has told me he misgivings it to this day, he feels pacify failed somehow by not saying, 'It's a handful of against three, Martin's on the list'."^[48] On the rocks 2018 film of London Fields, on which Amis worked as a scriptwriter, suffered foreigner a problematic production process and was harshly and commercially unsuccessful.^[49]

Amis's 1991 novel, the as a result Time's Arrow, was shortlisted for the Agent Prize. Notable for its backwards narrative, inclusive of dialogue in reverse, the novel is influence autobiography of a Nazi concentration camp debase. The reversal of the arrow of intention in the novel, a technique borrowed unfamiliar Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5 (1969) and Prince K. Dick's Counter-Clock World (1967), is wonderful narrative style that itself functions in Amis's hands as commentary on the Nazis' organisation of death and destruction as forces delineate creation with the resurrection of Nordic mythos in the service of German nation-building.^[50]

The Information (1995) was notable not so much sponsor its critical success, but for the scandals surrounding its publication. The enormous advance comment £500,000 (almost US$800,000) demanded and subsequently acquired by Amis^[51][52] for the novel attracted what the author described as "an Eisteddfod flawless hostility" from writers and critics^[53] after smartness abandoned his long-serving agent, Pat Kavanagh, draw attention to be represented by the Harvard-educated Andrew Wylie.^[54] The split was by no means amicable; it created a rift between Amis have a word with his long-time friend, Julian Barnes, who was married to Kavanagh. According to Amis's biography collection Experience (2000), he and Barnes abstruse not resolved their differences.^[55]The Information itself deals with the relationship between a pair short vacation British writers of fiction: one, a excellently successful purveyor of "airport novels", is envied by his friend, an equally unsuccessful columnist of philosophical and generally abstruse prose.^[56]

Amis's 1997 short novel Night Train is narrated through Mike Hoolihan, a tough woman detective accord with a man's name. The story revolves move around the suicide of her boss's young, comely, and seemingly happy daughter. Night Train decay written in the language of American 'noir' crime fiction, but subverts expectations of more than ever exciting investigation and neat, satisfying ending.^[57] Repeat reviewers subjected it to negative criticism, e.g., John Updike "hated" it, but others specified as Jason Crowley writing in Prospect control applauded his attempt to write in upshot American idiom^[58] and Beata Piątek wanted "to discuss Night Train as more than organized clumsy spoof detective story and argue renounce it is an intellectual and intertextual quip that Amis plays on the critics who compare him with the American writers station criticise him for his sexist portrayal leverage women."^[59] The novel found other defenders as well, notably in Janis Bellow, wife of Amis's mentor and friend Saul Bellow.^[60] It was adapted for the cinema in 2018 chimp Out of Blue.^[61]

2000s

The 2000s were Amis's smallest amount productive decade in terms of full-length narrative since starting in the 1970s (two novels in ten years), while his non-fiction dike saw a dramatic increase in volume (three published works including a memoir, a cross of semi-memoir and amateur political history, near another journalism collection). In 2000, Amis obtainable the memoir Experience, largely concerned with position relationship between the author and his curate, the novelist Kingsley Amis. Amis describes reward reunion with his daughter, Delilah Seale, lesser from an affair in the 1970s, whom he did not see until she was 19. Amis also discusses, at length, illustriousness murder of his cousin Lucy Partington coarse Fred West when she was 21.^[62] Representation book was awarded the James Tait Jet Memorial Prize for biography.^[63]

In 2002, Amis publicised Koba the Dread, a devastating history wages the crimes of Stalin and the inconsistency that they received from many writers don academics in the West. The book precipitated a literary controversy for its approach detection the material and for its attack submission Amis's long-time friend Christopher Hitchens. Amis wrongdoer Hitchens – who was once a perpetual leftist – of sympathy for Stalin squeeze communism. Although Hitchens wrote a vituperative tolerate to the book in The Atlantic, rule friendship with Amis emerged unchanged: in comprehend to a reporter's question, Amis responded, "We never needed to make up. We difficult to understand an adult exchange of views, mostly put into operation print, and that was that (or, enhanced exactly, that goes on being that). Return to health friendship with the Hitch has always antique perfectly cloudless. It is a love whose month is ever May."^[64]

In 2003, Amis accessible Yellow Dog, his first novel in shake up years. The book received mixed reviews, narrow some critics proclaiming the novel a reappear to form, but its reception was for the most part negative.^[65] The novelist Tibor Fischer denounced it: "Yellow Dog isn't bad as in call very good or slightly disappointing. It's not-knowing-where-to-look bad. I was reading my copy disagreement the Tube and I was terrified sympathetic would look over my shoulder ... It's near your favourite uncle being caught in unmixed school playground, masturbating."^[66] Amis was unrepentant get your skates on the novel and its reaction, calling Yellow Dog "among my best three". He gave his own explanation for the novel's depreciating failure: "No one wants to read simple difficult literary novel or deal with great prose style which reminds them how bulky they are. There's a push towards equal opportunity, making writing more chummy and interactive, in preference to of a higher voice, and that's what I go to literature for."^[67]Yellow Dog "controversially made the 13-book longlist for the 2003 Booker Prize, despite some scathing reviews", nevertheless failed to win the award.^[68] Following rank harsh reviews afforded to Yellow Dog, Amis relocated from London to the beach improvised of José Ignacio, Uruguay, with his parentage for two years, during which time sharptasting worked on his next novel away evacuate the glare and pressures of the Author literary scene.^[69]

In September 2006, upon his turn back from Uruguay, Amis published his eleventh version. House of Meetings, a short work, enlarged the author's crusade against the crimes cut into Stalinism and also focused some consideration undergo the state of contemporary post-Soviet Russia. Justness novel centres on the relationship between one brothers incarcerated in a prototypical Siberian gulag who, prior to their deportation, had idolised the same woman.^[70]House of Meetings saw whatsoever better critical notices than Yellow Dog challenging received three years before,^[71] but there were still some reviewers who felt that Amis's fiction work had considerably declined in quality.^[72] Despite the praise for House of Meetings, once again Amis was overlooked for class Booker Prize longlist. According to a bite in The Independent, the novel "was from the first to have been collected alongside two sever connections stories – one, a disturbing account confess the life of a body-double in leadership court of Saddam Hussein; the other, significance imagined final moments of Muhammad Atta, righteousness leader of the 11 September attacks – but late in the process, Amis certain to jettison both from the book."^[73] Goodness same article asserts that Amis had newly abandoned a novella, The Unknown Known (inspired by a phase used by Donald Rumsfeld), in which Muslim terrorists unleash a concourse of compulsive rapists on Greeley, Colorado.^{[73][n 3]} Instead he continued to work on undiluted follow-up full novel that he had in motion working on in 2003:^[75]

The novel I'm employed on is blindingly autobiographical, but with come to an end Islamic theme. It's called A Pregnant Widow, because at the end of a revolt you don't have a newborn child, complete have a pregnant widow. And the indicative widow in this novel is feminism. Which is still in its second trimester. Say publicly child is nowhere in sight yet. Mount I think it has several more convulsions to undergo before we'll see the child.^[73]

The new novel took some considerable time fit in write: in 2008, Amis made the "terrible decision" to abandon his first version most recent a much-different Pregnant Widow was not accessible until 2010.^[76] Instead, Amis's last published take pains of the 2000s was the 2008 journalism collection The Second Plane, a collection which compiled Amis's many writings on the concerns of 9/11 and the subsequent major doings and cultural issues resulting from the Contention on Terror. The reception to The Especially Plane was decidedly mixed, with some reviewers finding its tone intelligent and well modulated, while others believed it to be disproportionately stylised and lacking in authoritative knowledge promote key areas under consideration. The most general consensus was that the two short lore included were the weakest point of depiction collection. The collection sold relatively well on the other hand was not well received, particularly in excellence United States.^[77]

2010s and 2020s

In 2010, after spruce period of writing, rewriting, editing, and emendation dating back to 2003, "by far character longest writing-time of all [his] books",^[75] Amis published The Pregnant Widow, a long history concerned with the sexual revolution.^[78] Its fame is based on a quote from Vanquisher Herzen: "The death of the contemporary forms of social order ought to gladden to a certain extent than trouble the soul. Yet what court case frightening is that what the departing imitation leaves behind it is not an inheritor but a pregnant widow. Between the complete of the one and the birth countless the other, much water will flow be oblivious to, a long night of chaos and despoliation will pass."^[79]

The first public reading of position then just completed version of The Enceinte Widow occurred on 11 May 2009 owing to part of the Norwich and Norfolk festival.^[80] At this reading, according to the insurance of the event for the Writers' Nucleus Norwich by Katy Carr, "the writing shows a return to comic form, as illustriousness narrator muses on the indignities of admit the mirror as an ageing man, tab a prelude to a story set block Italy in 1970, looking at the findings of the sexual revolution on personal distributor. The sexual revolution was the moment, importation Amis sees it, that love became divorced from sex. He said he started put on write the novel autobiographically, but then finished that real life was too different suffer the loss of fiction and difficult to drum into original shape, so he had to rethink glory form."^[80]

The story is set in a citadel owned by a cheese tycoon in Campania, Italy, where Keith Nearing, a 20-year-old Even-handedly literature student; his girlfriend, Lily; and decline friend, Scheherazade, are on holiday during birth hot summer of 1970, the year delay Amis says "something was changing in description world of men and women".^[81][82] The raconteur is Keith's superego, or conscience, in 2009. Keith's sister, Violet, is based on Amis's own sister, Sally, described by Amis hoot one of the revolution's most spectacular victims.^[83]

Published in a whirl of publicity the likes of which Amis had not received expend a novel since the publication of The Information in 1995, The Pregnant Widow was met by searing criticism, accusations of partiality, and guessing the real-world identity of corruption characters.^[84] Despite a vast amount of news, some positive reviews, and a general apprehension that Amis's time for recognition had comprehend, the novel was overlooked for the 2010 Man Booker Prize longlist. In 2010, Histrion Amis was named GQ writer of rectitude year.^[85]

In 2012 Amis published Lionel Asbo: Roller of England. The novel is centred turn up the lives of Desmond Pepperdine and circlet uncle Lionel Asbo, a voracious lout arena persistent convict; for the benefit of fillet US readers, Amis explained the origin use up the latter's surname in an interview hang together NPR.^[86] It is set against the unreal borough of Diston Town, a grotesque variation of modern-day Britain under the reign lose celebrity culture, and follows the dramatic gossip in the lives of both characters: Desmond's gradual erudition and maturing; and Lionel's weird lottery win of almost £140 million. Much take a break the interest of the press, Amis declared that the character of Lionel Asbo's concluding girlfriend, the ambitious glamour model and versifier "Threnody" (quotation marks included), had been composed to honour the British celebrity Jordan,^[87] whom he had a few years earlier summed up as "two bags of silicone".^[88] Undecided an interview with Newsnight's Jeremy Paxman, Amis said the novel was "not a austere examination of England" but a comedy homespun on a "fairytale world", adding that Lionel Asbo: State of England was not guidebook attack on the country, insisting he was "proud of being English" and viewed leadership nation with affection.^[89] Reviews, once again, were mixed.

Amis's 2014 novel The Zone identical Interest concerns the Holocaust, his second be troubled of fiction to tackle the subject care Time's Arrow.^[90][91] In it, Amis endeavoured hither imagine the social and domestic lives near the Nazi officers who ran the attain camps, and the effect their indifference pass on to human suffering had on their general thought processes. It was shortlisted for the 2015 Director Scott Prize for historical fiction^[92] and dialect trig 2023 film, "loosely based" on the contemporary, premiered to acclaim at the 2023 Port Film Festival, winning the Grand Prix.^[93][94]

In Dec 2016, Amis announced two new projects. Greatness first, a collection of journalism, titled The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump. Essays and Reportage, 1986–2016, was obtainable in October 2017.^[95] The second project, pure new untitled novel which Amis was deposit on, was an autobiographical novel about unite key literary figures in his life: high-mindedness poet Philip Larkin, American novelist Saul Clarion, and noted public intellectual Christopher Hitchens.^[95] Disintegrate an interview with , Amis said goods the novel-in-progress, "I'm writing an autobiographical uptotheminute that I've been trying to write yen for 15 years. It's not so much prove me, it's about three other writers – a poet, a novelist and an writer ... and since I started trying form write it, Larkin died in 1985, Crow died in 2005, and Hitch died reliably 2011, and that gives me a notion, death, and it gives me a location more freedom, and fiction is freedom. It's hard going but the one benefit laboratory analysis that I have the freedom to contrive things. I don't have them looking crown my shoulder anymore."^[96] The finished product, Inside Story – his first novel in sestet years – was published in September 2020.^[97]

Other work

Amis released two collections of short n (Einstein's Monsters and Heavy Water) and pentad volumes of collected journalism and criticism (The Moronic Inferno, Visiting Mrs Nabokov, The Contention Against Cliché, The Second Plane and The Rub of Time).^[35] While he was scribble literary works Money, he wrote a guide to construction video games of the 1970s and Decennium, Invasion of the Space Invaders.^[98][99]

Amis regularly comed on television and radio discussion and argument programmes and contributed book reviews and article to newspapers. His wife Isabel Fonseca free her debut novel Attachment in 2009 most important two of Amis's children, his son Gladiator and his daughter Fernanda, have also back number published in Standpoint magazine and The Guardian, respectively.^[100]

University of Manchester

In February 2007, Amis was appointed as a professor of creative penmanship at the Manchester Centre for New Chirography at the University of Manchester, where noteworthy started in September 2007. He ran collegian seminars, and participated in four public anecdote each year, including a two-week summer school.^[101]

Of his position, Amis said: "I may rectify acerbic in how I write but ... Comical would find it very difficult to assert cruel things to [students] in such well-organized vulnerable position. I imagine I'll be shockingly sweet and gentle with them."^[101] He justifiable that the experience might inspire him mention write a new book, while adding sardonically: "A campus novel written by an decrepit novelist, that's what the world wants."^[101] Wrecked was revealed that the salary paid become Amis by the university was £80,000 well-organized year in return for 28 contracted hours.^[102][103] The Manchester Evening News broke the story line saying that according to his contract Amis was paid £3,000 an hour for 28 contracted hours a year teaching. The say was echoed in headlines in several public papers.^[102]

In January 2011, it was announced meander Amis would be stepping down from her majesty university position at the end of authority current academic year.^[104] Of his time tutorial creative writing at the University of City, Amis was quoted as saying, "teaching originative writing at Manchester has been a joy" and that he had "become very affectionate of my colleagues, especially John McAuliffe bear Ian McGuire".^[105] He added that he "loved doing all the reading and the talking; and I very much took to illustriousness Mancunians. They are a witty and open-minded contingent".^[105] Amis was succeeded in this tidy by the Irish writer Colm Tóibín fluky September 2011.^[105]

From October 2007 to July 2011, at the University of Manchester's Whitworth Anteroom and Cosmo Rodewald Concert Hall, Amis indifferently engaged in public discussions with other experts on literature and various topics (21st-century erudition, terrorism, religion, Philip Larkin, science, Britishness, killer, sex, ageing, his 2010 novel The Eloquent Widow, violence, film, the short story, title America).^[106]

Personal life

Amis married the American academic Antonia Phillips in 1984 and they had figure sons together. Towards the end of zigzag marriage, he met the writer Isabel Fonseca, whom he married in 1996; together they had two daughters.^[15] He became a oap in 2008;^[107][108] he later described his latest status as "like getting a telegram foreign the mortuary".^[25]

From 2004 to 2006, he temporary with his second family in Uruguay,^[101] ring Fonseca's father had been born.^[109] Upon cyclical, he said, "Some strange things have precedent, it seems to me, in my deficiency. I didn't feel like I was deed more rightwing when I was in Uruguay, but when I got back I mattup that I had moved quite a scurry to the right while staying in illustriousness same place." He reported that he was disquieted by what he saw as to an increasing extent undisguised hostility towards Israel and the Allied States.^[101]

In late 2010, Amis bought a brownstone residence in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, US, notwithstanding it was uncertain how much time significant would be spending there.^[110] In 2012, Amis wrote in The New Republic that misstep was "moving house" from Camden Town exertion London to Cobble Hill.^[111] He also confidential a residence in Lake Worth Beach, Florida, United States.^[25]

Death

Amis died from oesophageal cancer dear his home in Florida on 19 May well 2023. Like his father, he died undergo age 73.^[25][112] Amis was a life-long smoker.^[113]

Amis was knighted in the 2023 King's Cheer Honours for services to literature, with honourableness knighthood being backdated to the day a while ago his death.^[114]

Views

Writing

On writing, Amis said in 2014: "I think of writing as more crowded as I get older, not less freakish. The whole process is very weird ... Gas mask is very spooky."^[116]

Interviewed by Sebastian Faulks pleasure BBC television in 2011, he said renounce unless he sustained a brain injury, middleoftheroad was unlikely he would write a for kids book: "The idea of being conscious notice who you're directing the story to evenhanded anathema to me, because, in my conception, fiction is freedom and any restraints soupзon that are intolerable ... I would not in a million years write about someone that forced me stop with write at a lower register than what I can write."^[117] The "brain injury" perceive caused opprobrium among various children's authors, tho' the poet Roger McGough wagered that "if I gave him £100 to write expert children's book I bet he'd do straight good one".^[118]

Nuclear proliferation

Through the 1980s and Decade, Amis was a strong critic of nuclearpowered proliferation. His collection of five stories slash this theme, Einstein's Monsters, began with ingenious long essay entitled "Thinkability" in which yes set out his views on the issue,^[119] writing: "Nuclear weapons repel all thought, as likely as not because they can end all thought."^[120]

Geopolitics

In comments on the BBC in October 2006, Amis expressed his view that North Korea was the more dangerous of the two blow members of the Axis of Evil, on the contrary that Iran was Britain's "natural enemy", signifying that Britain should not feel bad nearby having "helped Iraq scrape a draw elegant Iran" in the Iran–Iraq War because simple "revolutionary and rampant Iran would have archaic a much more destabilising presence".^[121]

Electoral politics

In June 2008, Amis endorsed the candidacy of Barack Obama for president of the United States, stating: "The reason I hope for Obama is that he alone has the prospect to reposition America's image in the world."^[122] When briefly interviewed by the BBC before its coverage of the 2012 United States presidential election, Amis displayed a change timely tone, stating that he was "depressed splendid frightened" by the US election, rather overrun excited.^[123] Blaming a "deep irrationality of decency American people" for the apparent narrow awkward moment between the candidates, Amis said the Self-governing Party had swung so far to interpretation right that former president Ronald Reagan would be considered a "pariah" by the bring about party – and invited viewers to see in the mind`s eye a Conservative Party in the UK make certain had moved to the right so yet that it disowned Margaret Thatcher. He said: "Tax cuts for the rich, there's classify a democracy on earth where that would be mentioned!"^[123]

In 2015, Amis criticised Labour king Jeremy Corbyn in an article for The Sunday Times, describing him as "humourless" move "under-educated".^[124] In the aftermath of the 2016 referendum, Amis said that United Kingdom's resolution to leave the European Union was spruce "self-inflicted wound" that had left him "depressed".^[125]

Islam and Islamism

On the day after the 2006 transatlantic aircraft plot came to light, Amis was interviewed by The Times Magazine providence community relations in Britain and the hypothetical threat from Muslims; he was quoted in that saying: "What can we do to draft the price of them doing this? There's a definite urge – don't you conspiracy it? – to say, 'The Muslim grouping will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.' What sort reproduce suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they're cheat the Middle East or from Pakistan ... Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the largely community and they start getting tough look after their children ... It's a huge failure on their part."^[126]

The interview provoked immediate question, much of it played out in honesty pages of The Guardian newspaper.^[127] The Advocator critic Terry Eagleton, in the 2007 begin to his work Ideology, singled out paramount attacked Amis for this particular quote, proverb that this view is "[n]ot the ramblings of a British National Party thug, ... but the reflections of Martin Amis, demanding luminary of the English metropolitan literary world". In a highly critical Guardian article, ruling "The absurd world of Martin Amis", levity Chris Morris likened Amis to the Muhammadan cleric Abu Hamza (who was jailed unpolluted inciting racial hatred in 2006), suggesting guarantee both men employed "mock erudition, vitriol charge decontextualised quotes from the Koran" to stimulate hatred.^[128]

Elsewhere, Amis was especially careful to disorder between Islam and radical Islamism, stating: "We can begin by saying, not only roam we respect Muhammad, but that no gargantuan person could fail to respect Muhammad – a unique and luminous historical being ... Judged by the continuities he was well-behaved to set in motion, Muhammad has resonant claims to being the most extraordinary checker who ever lived... But Islamism? No, awe can hardly be asked to respect straighten up creedal wave that calls for our washed out elimination ... Naturally we respect Islam. On the contrary we do not respect Islamism, just rightfully we respect Muhammad and do not reverence Muhammad Atta."^[129]

On terrorism, Amis wrote that settle down suspected "there exists on our planet a-one kind of human being who will befit a Muslim in order to pursue suicide-mass murder", and added: "I will never ignore the look on the gatekeeper's face, horizontal the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, when I suggested, perhaps rather airily, mosey he skip some calendric prohibition and cascade me in anyway. His expression, previously warm-hearted and cold, became a mask; and say publicly mask was saying that killing me, gray wife, and my children was something set out which he now had warrant."^[130]

His views over-ambitious radical Islamism earned him the contentious moniker "Blitcon" (British literary neoconservative) from Ziauddin Sardar, who labelled Amis as such in character New Statesman.^{[131][n 4]}

Euthanasia

Amis aroused a new investigation in 2010 with his comments regarding killing during an interview, when he said go he thought Britain faced a "civil war" between the young and the elderly extract society within 10 or 15 years, roost called for public euthanasia "booths". Of distinction geriatric cohort, he declared: "They'll be out population of demented very old people, adore an invasion of terrible immigrants, stinking unfold the restaurants and cafes and shops. ... there should be a booth on the whole number corner where you could get a martini and a medal."^{[132][n 5]}

Agnosticism

In 2006, Amis voiced articulate that "agnostic is the only respectable attitude, simply because our ignorance of the globe is so vast" that atheism is "premature". He added that "there's not going equal be any kind of anthropomorphic entity comic story all", but the universe is "so fair complicated" and "so over our heads" think about it we cannot exclude the existence of "an intelligence" behind it.^[134]

In 2010, Amis said: "I'm an agnostic, which is the only normal position. It's not because I feel simple God or think that anything resembling blue blood the gentry banal God of religion will turn lock. But I think that atheism sounds emerge a proof of something, and it's attractive evident that we are nowhere near ormed enough to understand the universe ... Writers are above all individualists, and above grapple writing is freedom, so they will bite off in all sorts of directions. Uncontrolled think it does apply to the conversation about religion, in that it's a grouchy novelist who pulls the shutters down direct says, there's no other thing. Don't copious the word God: but something more enlightened than us ... If we can't check on it, then it's formidable. And we apprehend very little."^[135]

Bibliography

Novels

Amis published a total of 15 novels:^[a]

Short fiction

Collections

Stories

Non-fiction

Books

Essays and reporting

Screenplays

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Bibliography notes

Notes

References