Martin Amis

Amis grew up in the shadow and orbit of his father, Kingsley Amis, moved between a dozen schools as a rebellious teenager, and briefly acted in a film adaptation of A High Wind in Jamaica before settling on writing. His debut, The Rachel Papers, won the Somerset Maugham Award at twenty-four and announced the savage comic voice (dense with wordplay, self-loathing, and appetite) that would define his career.

Money, narrated by a self-destructive advertising director on a transatlantic bender, became the definitive novel of 1980s excess and cemented his reputation alongside contemporaries and close friends Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, and Christopher Hitchens, part of a famously competitive London literary generation. He later took on weightier historical subjects (the Holocaust in Time's Arrow, Stalin's Russia in Koba the Dread) before his death from esophageal cancer in 2023, the same disease that killed Hitchens.