Renowned British author Martin Amis has died aged 73 after a cancer battle.
He died on Friday at his home in Lake Worth, Flordia, his wife, the writer Isabel Fonseca, said the cause was esophageal cancer.
Mr Amis published 15 novels throughout his career, gaining prominence in the 1980s and 90s.
His is well known for his so-called London trilogy of novels — ‘Money: A Suicide Note’ (1985), ‘London Fields’ (1990) and ‘The Information’ (1995).
His final novel, ‘Inside Story,’ published in 2020, was a ‘novelized autobiography’ that in part looked at his friendship with Christopher Hitchens – who died of the same cancer in 2011.
Mr Amis’s was the son of well-known 1950s novelists Kingsley Amis, who died in 1995.
Mr Amis said having a famous writer for a father was a blessing and curse but acknowledged he’d have been in a ‘very different position’ if his father had been a schoolteacher.
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Renowned British author Martin Amis has died aged 73 after a cancer battle
Mr Amis published 15 novels throughout his career, gaining prominence in the 1980s and 90s.
Martin Louis Amis was born on August 25, 1949, in Oxford and had an older brother, Philip, and a younger sister, Sally, who died in 2000.
He read nothing but comic books until his stepmother, the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, introduced him to Jane Austen, whom he often names as his earliest influence.
He studied at Exeter College, Oxford, where in 1971 he graduated with honors in English.
Mr Amis wrote his first novel, ‘The Rachel Papers,’ in 1973, on nights and weekends, noting if it had failed he may have considered academia.
In 1984 Mr. Amis married Ms. Phillips, a widowed Boston philosophy teacher, and they had two sons, Louis and Jacob.
After he and Ms. Phillips divorced, Mr. Amis married Uruguayan American writer Ms. Fonseca in 1998.
He returned to Britain in September 2006 after living in Uruguay for two-and-a half years with his second wife and their two young daughters.
Mr Amis became a grandfather in 2008, when his daughter Delilah gave birth to a son.
While a good friend to Christopher Hitchens, Mr Amis said in 2006 that ‘agnostic is the only respectable position, simply because our ignorance of the universe is so vast’ that atheism is ‘premature’.
In 2010, he said: ‘I’m an agnostic, which is the only rational position. It’s not because I feel a God or think that anything resembling the banal God of religion will turn up.
‘But I think that atheism sounds like a proof of something, and it’s incredibly evident that we are nowhere near intelligent enough to understand the universe…Writers are above all individualists, and above all writing is freedom, so they will go off in all sorts of directions.
‘I think it does apply to the debate about religion, in that it’s a crabbed novelist who pulls the shutters down and says, there’s no other thing. Don’t use the word God: but something more intelligent than us… If we can’t understand it, then it’s formidable. And we understand very little.’
