The Writers of Wales Database

AMIS, MARTIN

Website: http://www.martinamisweb.com/

Martin Amis was born in Swansea and attended Swansea Grammar School. He graduated from Oxford University and then worked for the Times Literary Supplement, followed by literary editor for The Observer. His first novel The Rachel Papers (Jonathan Cape, 1973) won the Somerset Maugham Award and was adapted into a film.

Martin has since written a further twelve novels, a screenplay, six works of non-fiction, five short story collections, and nearly four hundred reviews and essays. He is most famous for his 'London Trilogy', comprising Money (Jonathan Cape, 1984), London Fields (Jonathan Cape, 1989), and The Information (Jonathan Cape, 1995). Martin has won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography, and has been shortlisted for numerous other awards including the Man Booker Prize. His second novel, Dead Babies (Jonathan Cape, 1975) was adapted into a film in 2000.

A social commentator and critic, Martin has become one of the most prominent and influential novelists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. He is currently Professor of Creative Writing at The Manchester Centre for New Writing in the University of Manchester and divides his time between there and London.

Review:
With respect to Experience (Jonathan Cape, 2000)

”…Experience is a beautiful, and beautifully strange book, and it is unlike anything one expected…From…painful, painstaking pebbles,...subtleties of detail and implication, is this fine, affecting book built…”
James Wood, The Guardian


Selected Publications:
Novels
The Rachel Papers (Jonathan Cape, 1973)
Dead Babies (Jonathan Cape, 1975)
Success (Jonathan Cape, 1978)
Other People: A Mystery Story (Jonathan Cape, 1981)
Money (Jonathan Cape, 1984)
London Fields (Jonathan Cape, 1989)
Time’s Arrow, or The Nature of the Offence (Jonathan Cape, 1991)
The Information (Jonathan Cape, 1995)
Night Train (Jonathan Cape, 1997)
Yellow Dog (Jonathan Cape, 2003)
House of Meetings (Jonathan Cape, 2006)
The Pregnant Widow (Jonathan Cape, 2010)
Lionel Asbo: State of England (Jonathan Cape, 2012)

Short fiction
Einstein’s Monsters (Jonathan Cape, 1987)
Two Stories (Moorhouse & Sorensen, 1994)
God's Dice (Penguin, 1995)
Heavy Water and Other Stories (Jonathan Cape, 1998)
State of England and Other Stories (Flamingo, 1998)

Non-fiction
Invasion of the Space Invaders (Hutchinson, 1982)
The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (Jonathan Cape, 1986)
Visiting Mrs Nabokov: And Other Excursions (Jonathan Cape, 1993)
Experience (Jonathan Cape, 2000)
The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews, 1971-2000 (Jonathan Cape, 2001)
Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (Jonathan Cape, 2002)
The Second Plane (Jonathan Cape, 2008)



Einstein’s Monsters (Jonathan Cape, 1987)

An ex-circus strongman, veteran of Warsaw, 1939, and Notting Hill rough-justice artist, meets his own personal holocaust and 'Einsteinian' destiny; maximum boredom and minimum love-making are advised in a 2020 epidemic; a virulent new strain of schizophrenia overwhelms the young son of a 'father of the nuclear age'; evolution takes a rebarbative turn in a Kafkaesque love story; and the history of the earth is frankly discussed by one who has witnessed it all. The stories in this collection form a unity and reveal a deep preoccupation: '"Einstein's Monsters" refers to nuclear weapons but also to ourselves,' writes Amis in his enlightening introductory essay, 'We are Einstein's monsters: not fully human, not for now.'

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London Fields (Jonathan Cape, 1989)

Set in the pubs and streets of West London, this is a murder story for the end of the millennium.  

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