Salman Rushdie has led tributes to Martin Amis after the celebrated author died aged 73.
Rushdie said Amis, who died at his home in Florida on Saturday, had a unique literary voice and that “it was unwise to try to imitate him”, adding in a piece for the New Yorker: “He used to say that what he wanted to do was leave behind a shelf of books – to be able to say: ‘From here to here, it’s me.’ His voice is silent now. His friends will miss him terribly. But we have the shelf.”
That shelf includes 15 novels, including Money, London Fields, 2014’s Zone of Interest, the film adaptation of which opened at the Cannes film festival this week, and his last novel, Inside Story, published in 2020.
The death of Amis, who had been diagnosed with oesophageal cancer – the same illness that killed his friend, the author and journalist Christopher Hitchens, in 2011 – brought widespread dismay in publishing and beyond.
His UK editor, Michal Shavit, said: “It’s hard to imagine a world without Martin Amis in it. He was the king – a stylist extraordinaire, super cool, a brilliantly witty, erudite and fearless writer, and a truly wonderful man.
“He has been so important and formative for so many readers and writers over the last half century. Every time he published a new book it was an event. He will be remembered as one of the greatest writers of his time.”
Amis’s agent, Andrew Wylie, told the Guardian: “The level of attention Martin brought to each sentence was unique and special. He played on a field that few writers visited.”
“Amis was a princeling writer, fully serious, always careless, sometimes hurtful,” said the novelist Anne Enright. “Libidinous, propulsive, hilarious: I loved the feeling of possibility his discordant syntax released in the reader.
“Pick up an Amis book and you too could be The Man. The voices of his fictions freed the voice in other writers’ work, including my own. There was something about his confidence that was contagious and liberating.”
The novelist John Niven prompted Twitter users to post their favourite excerpts from Amis’s novels when he posted that the author’s death had “hit me hard” and began to tweet lines from them. The physicist Brian Cox responded by saying: “Scrolling through Twitter is worth it for once – it’s one remarkable paragraph after another.”
The former prime minister Boris Johnson tweeted that he was “shocked and sad at the death of Martin Amis – the greatest, darkest, funniest satirist since Evelyn Waugh. If you want cheering up, re-read the tennis match in Money.”
Amis was born on 25 August 1949, in Oxford, to the Booker prize-winning novelist Kingsley Amis and Hilary Ann Bardwell. After graduating from Exeter College, Oxford, he embarked on a series of journalism jobs at the Times Literary Supplement and New Statesman, before publishing his debut, The Rachel Papers, in 1973.
In an interview with the Paris Review in 1998, Amis described his philosophy of fiction writing: “Plots really matter only in thrillers. In mainstream writing the plot is – what is it? A hook. The reader is going to wonder how things turn out. In this respect, Money was a much more difficult book to write than London Fields because it is essentially a plotless novel. It is what I would call a voice novel. If the voice doesn’t work you’re screwed.”
Amis’s love of language over plot and narrative was highlighted by many mourning his death. The journalist and broadcaster Emily Maitlis said: “I am quietly devastated. Actually just loved the way he loved words. Dark, bleak and brilliantly funny. I grew up on #MartinAmis and will be for ever grateful.”
The actor and writer Steve Martin said: “When I was a young-er writer, I was at a small dinner with Martin Amis. A writer’s name came up and Martin said, casually: ‘Well, he’s a sloppy writer.’ I said: ‘What makes a sloppy writer?’ He said: ‘Unintended alliteration, accidental rhyme, repetition of words.’”
Enright told the Guardian: “It was fun to see his generation assert themselves in some new way against ponderous authority. Amis did it by voice alone. He made you feel that an act of expression was enough, more than enough – it had its own force and integrity, it had style.”
Amis, who was married to the American writer Isabel Fonseca, bought a brownstone residence in Brooklyn, New York, in 2010 and said the following year that he was leaving London to live in the US permanently. He also bought a house in Lake Worth, Florida, where he was staying when he died.
In an interview with the Guardian in 2017, he said he missed the English, and Londoners especially: “I miss the wit … Americans aren’t as witty as Brits, because humour is about giving a little bit of offence. It’s an assertion of intellectual superiority.”
Tributes poured in from around the world and across the political divide. In Germany, the liberal-leaning Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper referred to Amis as “one of the most important contemporary British authors”, recalling the controversy that The Zone of Interest, which is set in Auschwitz, caused in Germany, leading to its rejection by the leading publishing house Hanser in 2015.
The conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung said Amis was “one of the greatest writers of the past hundred years”, who “polarised with his ruthless opinions but whose novels of the 80s and 90s are regarded as groundbreaking for the English-language literary scene”.
