Kingsley Amis

May 3, 2024 | thebookerprizes.substack.com | Kingsley Amis

Throughout May, and one year on from his death in May 2023, we’re celebrating Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow, which is our latest Monthly Spotlight title. Although one of the best-known writers of his generation, Amis was shortlisted for the Booker Prize just once, in 1991, for this highly inventive depiction of a Nazi war criminal whose life story is told in reverse, and which raises big questions about morality and destiny.

Jan 19, 2024 | capx.co | Kingsley Amis

The idea of a novelist of the stature of Kingsley Amis speaking at a Conservative Party Conference today is, frankly, laughable. But in 1979, when Margaret Thatcher gave her first conference speech as Prime Minister, Amis addressed a fringe meeting hosted by the Centre for Policy Studies.

Jan 3, 2024 | thebookerprizes.substack.com | Paul Beatty |Kingsley Amis |Howard Jacobson |David Lodge

You might have concluded from some recent Booker Prize winners that great novels aren’t particularly funny any more. It’s true that 2023’s winner, Prophet Song by Paul Lynch, is a story of fear and oppression – therein lies its power – and that recent shortlists have sometimes been light on laughs. But if you’re looking for a book to cheer you up, the good news is that the Booker Prize has always had an ear for comedy as well as tragedy.

Dec 12, 2023 | thebookerprizes.com | William Boyd |Kingsley Amis

If you ask William Boyd – author of this month’s Booker Prize Book of the Month, Any Human Heart – which of his 17 novels you should read first, you’ll get no help. ‘There are no runts of the litter as far as I’m concerned,’ he said when I interviewed him for The Irish Times in 2022. ‘Each novel in a way has turned out as I hoped it would.’ This is a confidence that most writers would kill for, and it comes through in his vigorous, entertaining novels.