Global Courant 2023-05-21 02:20:38
The celebrated novelist died at home in Florida after a battle with esophageal cancer, his wife says.
The well-known and influential British writer Martin Amis has died at his home in Lake Worth, Florida, at the age of 73.
His wife Isabel Fonseca told media on Saturday that the author of searing and insightful works such as Money: A Suicide Note, London Fields and Time’s Arrow passed away Friday after battling esophageal cancer.
Amis was “one of the most acclaimed and discussed writers of the past 50 years and the author of 14 novels,” according to the Booker Prizes website, the UK’s leading literary prizes for fiction.
In 2008 he was named one of the 50 best British writers since 1945 and nominated twice for the Booker Prize.
Publisher Vintage Books said it was “devastated” by Amis’s death.
“He leaves a towering legacy and an indelible mark on the British cultural landscape and will be greatly missed,” said Vintage on its Twitter account.
We are devastated by the death of our author and friend, Martin Amis. Our thoughts are with all his family and loved ones, especially his children and his wife Isabel. He leaves a towering legacy and an indelible mark on the British cultural landscape and will be greatly missed. pic.twitter.com/aFSg2u7MbJ
— Vintage Books (@vintagebooks) May 20, 2023
The author rose to literary fame in the 1980s as British fiction boomed and made Amis famous alongside novelists such as Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro and Ian McEwan.
It was with Money, published in 1984 with a comedic take on consumerism, that Amis broke into the literary scene more widely.
In addition to his novels, Amis has published two short story collections and eight works of non-fiction.
In 2008, the Times of London named the younger Amis one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.
In recent decades, Amis became a public intellectual and appeared regularly on television, sometimes alongside his old friend Christopher Hitchens, a British-American writer and renowned atheist who died in 2011.
In an essay around the fifth anniversary of 9/11, The Age of Horrorism, Amis wrote that moderate Islam had lost a civil war within the faith.
Amis sparked outrage and was accused of Islamophobia when he said in a 2006 interview: “There is a clear urge to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it puts its house in order’.”
“Don’t let them travel. Deportation ahead. Restriction of freedoms…until it hurts the whole community and they start to get tough with their kids,” he said.
