Martin Amis

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If you haven’t heard of Martin Amis, frankly, we’re surprised that you’re browsing The Book Show pages at all, although welcome if you've arrived here unintentionally; that aside, this is usually the bit where we give a brief biography of the show’s guests, but faced with encapsulating Amis’ prominent life and considerable work in 500 words, we thought we ought to refer you in the first instance to a couple of in-depth biographies if you’re interested in finding out significantly more about the literary giant: Father and Son: Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, and the British Novel Since 1950 by Gavin Keulks, or of course, Amis’ own acclaimed volume of autobiography, Experience. However, if you’re happy with our significantly condensed version, here it is...

Martin Amis was born in Oxford in 1949, the son of the writer Kingsley Amis. He was educated in schools in Britain, Spain and America, and graduated from Exeter College, Oxford, with First Class Honours in English. He wrote and published his first novel, The Rachel Papers, in 1973, while working as an editorial assistant at the Times Literary Supplement. The novel won a Somerset Maugham Award in 1974 and was followed by Dead Babies in 1975. He was Literary Editor of the The New Statesman between 1977 and 1979, publishing his third novel, Success, in 1978.

Regarded by many critics as one of the most influential and innovative voices in contemporary British fiction, Amis is often grouped with the generation of British-based novelists that emerged during the 1980s and included Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes. Amis has gone on- through his numerous friendships and affairs – to become a major hub of contemporary literary society. For example, Amis was assistant to author Claire Tomalin (now married to Michael Frayn) while she was literary editor of The New Statesman; he had a brief affair with Emma Soames – granddaughter of Winston Churchill – who later edited Tatler, and the ES and Telegraph Magazines, and is now editor of Saga magazine; he continues to be great friends with Christopher Hitchens, with whom he used to spend long literary lunches with Clive James and Julian Barnes, and his former agent (another old flame) was Julie Kavanagh, who is now married to Julian Barnes. (The Barnes/Kavanagh/Amis triangle is perhaps one of the most notorious in the Amis mythology: when Amis changed agents in 1995, dumping Kavanagh in favour of Andrew Wylie (by most accounts in order to demand a big advance for his next novel, which he spent on a new mouthful of teeth, further evidence to a number of catty observers that he had sold out to Hollywood), Barnes severed their hitherto-warm friendship with a letter that wished Amis as much success as  Wylie’s other clients such as Salmon Rushdie (then under a death sentence by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini) and Bruce Chatwin (dead of AIDS), and signed off with two words, which, Amis wrote, “consist of seven letters. Three of them are f's.”)

Amis’ work has been heavily influenced by American fiction, especially the work of Philip Roth, John Updike and Saul Bellow. A loose trilogy of novels set in London begins with Money: A Suicide Note (1984), a satire of Thatcherite amorality and greed; continues with London Fields (1989); and concludes with The Information (1995), a tale of literary rivalry. Time's Arrow (1991), was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction.

Other books include Night Train (1997), a pastiche of American detective fiction; an acclaimed volume of autobiography, Experience (2000) - winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize – and Koba the Dread, a history of the crimes committed by Lenin and Stalin and their denial by writers and academics in the West.

Amis is also the author of several collections of essays, including The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (1986); Visiting Mrs Nabokov and Other Excursions (1993); and The War Against Cliché (2001); which includes essays and book reviews. His two collections of short stories are Einstein's Monsters (1987), and Heavy Water and Other Stories (1998).

His most recent books are House of Meetings (2006), which takes the form of a novella and two short stories; The Second Plane (2008), a book of essays and short stories, and The Pregnant Widow (2010) which takes the feminist revolution of the 1970s as its’ theme.

Amis is a regular contributor to numerous newspapers, magazines and journals, including the Sunday Times, The Observer, the Times Literary Supplement and the New York Times. He was awarded an honorary LittD by the University of East Anglia in 2000. He became Professor of Creative Writing at Manchester University in 2007.

The Pregnant Widow
It was summer 1970 - a long, hot summer. In a castle in Italy, half a dozen young lives are afloat on the sea of change, trapped inside the history of the sexual revolution. The girls are acting like boys, and the boys are going on acting like boys, and Keith Nearing - twenty years old, a literature student all clogged up with the English novel - is struggling to twist feminism and the rise of women towards his own ends. The sexual revolution may have been a velvet revolution (in at least two senses), but it wasn't bloodless - and now, in the twenty-first century, the year 1970 finally catches up with Keith Nearing. The Pregnant Widow is a comedy of manners and a nightmare, brilliant, haunting and gloriously risqué. It is the most eagerly anticipated novel of the year and Martin Amis at his fearless best.

Find out more about The Pregnant Widow, including a free downloadable extract, at Lovereading.co.uk