‘Witty, caustic, dazzling’: Celebrated novelist Martin Amis dies aged 73

Tributes have been paid to the acclaimed British author Martin Amis who has died after suffering from cancer of the oesophagus.

The 73-year-old writer, whose seminal novels include Money and London Fields, died at his home at Lake Worth in Florida on Saturday night.

Amis’ works were rebellious, witty and daring and made him one of the most prominent writers of his generation.

Amis was part of a celebrated group of writers in the 80s and 90s that included Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie and Julian Barnes.

An era-defining author

Amis - the son of renowned British writer Kingsley Amis - burst onto the UK’s literary scene with black-comedy novels touching on subjects like drugs, sex and the media.

Money: A Suicide Note, a satire published in 1984, is considered one of his finest early works. It was included as one of the 100 best novels written in English by the Guardian which described it as a “zeitgeist book that remains one of the dominant novels of the 1980s.”

Further into his career, Amis began to explore loftier themes of war, history and the environment.

In 2020, Amis published his final work. Inside Story is an autobiographical novel portraying three of the most influential figures in his life: Philip Larkin, Saul Bellow and Christopher Hitchens.

In the New York Times Book Review, Tom Bissell described it as Amis’s “most beautiful book” with an account of Hitchens’ drawn-out death that will leave “only the most hardened” readers unmoved.

His writing style has been lauded by critics, with Michiko Kakutani writing in The New York Times in 2000 that “he is a writer equipped with a daunting arsenal of literary gifts: a dazzling, chameleonesque command of language, a willingness to tackle large issues and larger social canvases and an unforgiving, heat-seeking eye for the unwholesome ferment of contemporary life.”

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Following his death, fans have taken to social media to describe the impact of his work and experiences of meeting the author. Independent Paris bookshop Shakespeare and Company wrote that he was “one of the guests at our festival in 2010. He was witty, caustic, insightful, generous and dazzling, much like his writing.”

“In 1999 I approached Martin Amis at a signing & asked to interview him for my college magazine,” writer Max Liu posted on Twitter. “To my amazement he said ‘Give me a call’ & wrote his 0171 no. in this copy of The Information. He was so generous & patient with me, so unlike his reputation. Always loved him for that.”

Amis was born in 1949 in Oxford and attended schools in the UK, Spain and the US. He graduated from Oxford University with first-class honours in English.

An adaptation of Amis’s novel The Zone of Interest premiered this weekend at the Cannes Film Festival. The 2014 work, which was adapted by Jonathan Glazer and tells the story of a Nazi officer living beside Auschwitz, received some of the best reviews of the festival.