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Martin Louis Amis (born 25 August 1949) is an English novelist. His best-known novels are ''Money'' (1984) and ''London Fields'' (1989). He has received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his memoir ''Experience'' and has been listed for the Booker Prize twice to date (shortlisted in 1991 for ''Time's Arrow'' and longlisted in 2003 for ''Yellow Dog''). Amis served as the Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester until 2011. In 2008, ''The Times'' named him one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.〔(The 50 greatest British writers since 1945 ). ''The Times'', 5 January 2008, (subscription only).〕 Amis's work centres on the apparent excesses of late-capitalist Western society, whose perceived absurdity he often satirises through grotesque caricature; he has been portrayed as a master of what the ''New York Times'' called "the new unpleasantness".〔Stout, Mira. ("Martin Amis: Down London's mean streets" ), ''New York Times'', 4 February 1990.〕 Inspired by Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, and James Joyce, as well as by his father Kingsley Amis, Amis himself went on to influence many successful British novelists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, including Will Self and Zadie Smith.〔("Martin Amis" ), ''The Guardian'', 22 July 2008.〕 ==Early life== Amis was born in Swansea, Wales.〔 His father, noted English novelist Sir Kingsley Amis, was the son of a mustard manufacturer's clerk from Clapham, London;〔 his mother, Hilary "Hilly" Bardwell, was the daughter of a Ministry of Agriculture civil servant. He has an older brother, Philip; his younger sister, Sally, died in 2000. His parents divorced when he was twelve. He attended a number of schools in the 1950s and 1960s—including the Bishop Gore School (Swansea Grammar School), and Cambridgeshire High School for Boys—where he was described by one headmaster as "unusually unpromising".〔 The acclaim that followed his father's first novel ''Lucky Jim'' sent the family to Princeton, New Jersey, where his father lectured. In 1965, at age 15, he played John Thornton in the film version of Richard Hughes' ''A High Wind in Jamaica''. 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. After teenage years spent in flowery shirts and a short spell at Westminster School while living in Hampstead, he graduated from Exeter College, Oxford, with a "Congratulatory" First in English — "the sort where you are called in for a viva and the examiners tell you how much they enjoyed reading your papers."〔Leader, Zachary (2006). ''The Life of Kingsley Amis''. Cape, p. 614.〕 After Oxford, he found an entry-level job at ''The Times Literary Supplement'', and at age 27 became literary editor of the ''New Statesman'', where he met Christopher Hitchens, then a feature writer for ''The Observer'', who remained a close friend until Hitchens's death in 2011. At 5'6" tall he referred to himself as a 'short-arse'〔(【引用サイトリンク】work=Moreintelligentlife.com )〕 while a teenager. The bitterness in his books, as well as his much-publicised philandering, has been widely noted. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア(Wikipedia)』 ■ウィキペディアで「Martin Amis」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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