Though the younger Amis never won the Booker himself, he was shortlisted for his 1991 novel Time’s Arrow, a portrait of a Nazi war criminal told in reverse chronological order, and longlisted in 2003 for his novel Yellow Dog. He worked as the literary editor of the New Statesman between 19, during which time he published his third novel, Success.Īmis was often compared with his father, Kingsley Amis, who won the Booker prize in 1986 for his novel The Old Devils.

It won the Somerset Maugham award in 1974, and another book, the blackly comic Dead Babies, was published the following year. His first novel, The Rachel Papers, was published in 1973 while he was working as an editorial assistant at the Times Literary Supplement. He credited his stepmother, the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, with waking him up to literature when he was a drifting adolescent “averaging an O-level a year”: “She gave me a reading list and after an hour, I went and knocked on her study door and said: ‘I’ve got to know: does Elizabeth marry Darcy?’” “If the voice doesn’t work you’re screwed,” he added.Īmis was born in 1949 in Oxford, and educated at schools in Britain, Spain and the US, before going to Exeter College, Oxford, where he graduated with first-class honours in English. In an interview with the Paris Review, Amis said that “plots really matter only in thrillers”, and that Money was a “voice novel”.

Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis at the 1995 British book awards.

Pictures of the firmament