May 20. (EUROPE PRESS) –
The British novelist Martin Amis has died last Friday at the age of 73 due to esophageal cancer at his home in Lake Worth in Florida, United States, as reported by his partner, Isabel Fonseca. The British press has described the author of novels such as ‘Money’ or ‘London Fields’ as “defining an era”.
Amis belonged to a recognizable generation of British writers that also includes Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes, keys to understanding British literature of the 1980s.
In 1984 he published ‘Money’, considered one of the 100 best novels in English by ‘The Guardian’ critic Robert McCrum, who noted that the work “defines an era and remains one of the dominant novels of the 1980s”.
Amis was born in 1949 in Oxford and educated in the United Kingdom, Spain and the United States, although he returned to Oxford at the University of Exeter, graduating with honors in English Philology. The author attributed his interest in literature to his stepmother, the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard. His father, Kingsley Amis, was also a novelist.
His first novel was published in 1973, ‘Rachel’s Book’, when he was working as an assistant editor at ‘The Times’ literary supplement. The play won the Somerset Maugham Prize the following year. It was followed by novels such as ‘Dead Babies’, ‘Success’ or ‘The Arrow of Time’.
Also noteworthy are his memoirs, ‘Experience’, published in 2000 or ‘Koba the fearsome’, an essay on Iosif Stalin’s Terror at the helm of the USSR. His controversies include accusations of Islamophobia after saying that “Muslims should put their house in order” or his defense of “suicide booths” on the streets to deal with the aging of the British population.
