Martin Amis

Born in 1949, his childhood and education were messy and fragmented. Nevertheless he took a first from Oxford and worked on the TLS before becoming a published author at the age of twenty-four with The Rachel Papers. His early books, while delightful, lacked for some an extroversion and relevance to the outside world, until the appearance of Money in 1984, which explored the globe-trotting horror of eighties consumerism, greed, and squalor. London Fields brought us some Dickensian horror in the guise of loathsome wide-boy Keith Talent, and a post-modern murder mystery. These two books, and The Information (1995) form a loose 'London trilogy', and represent his strongest fiction.

The Information reaped a whirlwind of savagery from the press, who seemed to be out to destroy the man for his perceived arrogance, mysoginy, and audacity in changing agents and undertaking dental reconstruction. Amis once asked an American lecturer why the British disliked his fiction, and was told "it's not your books they hate, it's you." Reports that Amis got an advance of half a million pounds were somewhat wide of the mark it seemed. After Night-Train, a short experimental novella in 1996, Amis took a break from fiction and worked on two volumes of memoir, a collection of short fictions, and a collection of journalism. Yellow Dog was his first novel for seven years, and The House of Meetings was published in October, 2006.

His latest book is The Second Plane, in which he examines the causes and effects of the 9/11 attacks.

Fact file

Name: Martin Amis

Education: Exeter College, Oxford

Date of birth: 1949

Place of birth: Oxford

Current home: London

Genre: Literary fiction, written with the poet's flair for language, and the rock star's ear for a nice turn of phrase. Mostly set in London and the U.S., or at least New York and Los Angeles, his books steer a path through the murky worlds of petty crime, Hollywood film production and literary London, and his earlier fictions have an almost unhealthy preoccupation with sex and bad dentistry.

Similar Authors: Julian Barnes, Jonathan Coe