Martin Louis Amis

Martin Amis was a British novelist, essayist, memoirist, and screenwriter. He was 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 the Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester 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 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. (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0)

Sources

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Amis
• http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/features/3632936/Family-detective.html