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Artist
Martin Louis Amis FRSL (* 25 August 1949 in Swansea, South Wales) is a British novelist, the author of many novels including Money (1984) and London Fields (1989). He was the Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester, but stepped down at the end of the 2010/11 academic year. The Times named him in 2008 as one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945. Amis's raw material is what he sees as the absurdity of the postmodern condition and the excesses of late-capitalist Western society with its grotesque caricatures. He has thus been portrayed as the undisputed master of what The New York Times called "the new unpleasantness." Influenced by Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, and James Joyce, as well as by his father Kingsley Amis, he has inspired a generation of writers with his distinctive style, including Will Self and Zadie Smith. The Guardian writes that his critics have noted what Kingsley Amis called a "terrible compulsive vividness in his style ... that constant demonstrating of his command of English," and that the "Amis-ness of Amis will be recognisable in any piece before he reaches his first full stop." User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.