Martin Ami’s
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Books

Martin Amis memorial to be held in London

Friends, family and colleagues will celebrate the author with tributes and readings at St Martin-in-the-Fields church with limited tickets available for members of the public

Ella Creamer

Monday 27 May 2024

A celebration of the author Martin Amis, who died last May aged 73, is due to be held in London next month.

Friends, family and colleagues of Amis will gather at St Martin-in-the-Fields church in Trafalgar Square on 10 June for the event, which will include tributes and readings from the writer’s body of work.

Amis was best known for his 1984 novel Money and his 1989 novel London Fields. He “delighted, provoked, inspired and outraged readers of his fiction, reportage and memoirs across a literary career that set off like a rocket and went on to dazzle, streak and burn for almost 50 years,” wrote Boyd Tonkin in an obituary in the Guardian.

Amis was shortlisted for the Booker prize for his 1991 novel Time’s Arrow, and longlisted for his 2003 novel Yellow Dog. In 2000, he received the James Tait Black memorial prize for his memoir, Experience.

He died from oesophageal cancer at his home in Florida. Upon his death, tributes poured in from writers and politicians around the world. “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.”

“In the year since Martin died it has been gratifying how generous the assessments of his place in the modern literary canon have been, aided of course by the praise for Jonathan Glazer’s extraordinary film inspired by Martin’s novel The Zone of Interest,” said Amis’s longtime editor Dan Franklin. “I am confident that those speaking at his memorial service will add to this.”

A limited number of free tickets for members of the public wanting to attend the celebration are available on Eventbrite on a first-come, first-served basis. The service will begin at 4.30pm.

THE GUARDIAN