Martin Amis

Essayist and writer

One of Britain's foremost writers, Martin Amis is a novelist, essayist and short story writer. Amongst his best-known novels are The Rachel Papers (1973), which won the Somerset Maugham Award, Money: A Suicide Note (1984), London Fields (1989) and The Information (1995). He graduated from Exeter College, Oxford, and worked at the Times Literary Supplement before becoming the literary editor of the New Statesman. He is currently a Professor of Creative Writing at The Manchester Centre for New Writing, University of Manchester.

Amis's work has prompted new considerations of realism, postmodernism, feminism, politics, and culture. Recently he has criticized Arab countries for their lack of economic and cultural vitality, and his comments on the Muslim community living in the West have caused heated controversy. 2008 saw the publication of The Second Plane, a collection of Amis's numerous essays about the 9/11 and 7/7 terrorist bombings in the US and UK, the rise of radical Islam, and the war in Iraq.