Martin Louis Amis (born 25 August 1949) is an English novelist. His best-known novels are Money (1984) and London Fields (1989). He has received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his memoir Experience and has been listed for the Booker Prize twice to date (shortlisted in 1991 for Time's Arrow and longlisted in 2003 for Yellow Dog). Amis served as the Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester until 2011. The Times named him in 2008 as one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.Amis's work centres on the apparent excesses of late-capitalist Western society, whose perceived absurdity he often satirises through grotesque caricature; he has been portrayed as a master of what the New York Times called "the new unpleasantness". Inspired by Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, and James Joyce, as well as by his father Kingsley Amis, Amis himself went on to heavily influence many successful British novelists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, including Will Self and Zadie Smith.
London Fields, Saturn 3, Dead Babies, The Rachel Papers, The Nihilist's Double Vision
Star Sign
Virgo
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Quote
1
[on fiction set In the Nazi death camps] I respect the view that you shouldn't write about it, but I don't agree with it. Writing is about freedom, and freedom is indivisible. And it makes no philosophical, and certainly no literary sense to say that you stop at the gates of Auschwitz and you can't go in.
2
[on the choice of governance] Everywhere else on earth, or certainly in the free world, the argument between bowel and brain was settled centuries ago in favour of brain. It's an ancient idea that the leader of a democracy should not be the cleverest but the most average. That's an arguable point, but the world has decided otherwise - except in America, where it still divides the country right down the middle. I've never had a doubt that you should follow the brain. Of course, there are huge populations that don't feel that way, but in America they don't really impinge on intellectual life except during elections.
3
Nabokov, who was always a very good guide in these things, was convinced that the way you dealt with extreme villainy in fiction was not to punish it. Your villain is not to be tritely converted, as Dickens tended to do, but the novelist's job is bitter mockery, and that's part of how I'm going at it.
4
It's becoming clearer and clearer to me that the world is there to be celebrated by writers, and in fact this is what all the good ones do, and that the great fashion for gloom and grimness was in fact a false path that certain writers took, I think in response to the horrors of the first half of the twentieth century. Theodor Adorno's line, 'No poetry after Auschwitz' is in fact contradicted by Paul Celan, who was writing poetry in a Romanian labour camp.
5
We don't read Dickens for Little Nell and Esther Summerson; we read him for Quilp and Carker - all the villains and the wags and the eccentrics. That's where Dickens' energy goes. To channel energy into a good character is very difficult, and not very many writers have made goodness, happiness, the positive, work on the page.
6
Weapons are like money: no one knows the meaning of enough.
7
Only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and the rose grow without the thorn.
8
If God existed, and if He cared for humankind, He would never have given us religion.
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Fact
1
Was expelled from Sir Walter St John's grammar school aged 15 for taking 4 months off to act in A High Wind in Jamaica (1965).
2
(Paris - 1979) First writer to interview Roman Polanski when he fled the US (1978) after being charged with the statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl. The entire interview was reprinted in the Observer Film Magazine, a supplement of the UK's daily newspaper The Observer (6 Dec. 2009).
Completed a script for a new film version of Jane Austen's "Northanger Abbey". The project was subsequently dropped.
9
After reading "nothing but science fiction till he was fifteen or sixteen," as his father Kingsley Amis complained, Martin did extremely poorly in school until he determined to enter Oxford's Exeter College. He studied Latin and poetry to pass the entrance exam and graduated with a degree in English with first-class honors. He went to work as a book reviewer for the London Observer in 1971, and the following year was made an editorial assistant at the London Times Literary Supplement, where he was promoted to fiction and poetry editor in 1974. He also took editorial positions at the New Statesman and the London Observer before becoming a full-time writer.
10
His work has been compared with that of Vladimir Nabokov and Saul Bellow.
11
British writer. Son of the late writer Kingsley Amis.
Writer
Title
Year
Status
Character
London Fields
2016
novel completed
Money
2010
TV Mini-Series novel - 2 episodes
Dead Babies
2000
novel
The Rachel Papers
1989
novel
The Nihilist's Double Vision
1987
TV Movie original story
Saturn 3
1980
screenplay
Actor
Title
Year
Status
Character
A High Wind in Jamaica
1965
John Thornton
Self
Title
Year
Status
Character
Artsnight
2016
TV Series
Himself - Interviewee / Author
Tria33
2015
TV Series
Himself
Página 2
2009-2015
TV Series
Himself / Himself - Guest
Le grand journal de Canal+
2015
TV Series documentary
Himself
La grande librairie
2015
TV Series
Himself
Timeshift
2009-2014
TV Series documentary
Himself - Novelist, 'London Fields' / Himself - Author
$600,000
