Kingsley Amis

Kingsley Amis was a British novelist, poet, and critic who was one of the most prominent and controversial literary figures of post-war Britain. Born in Clapham, London, in 1922, he studied English at St John's College, Oxford, where he befriended Philip Larkin. He taught English at the University of Swansea and Cambridge before becoming a full-time writer. Amis's debut novel Lucky Jim, a comic masterpiece about a hapless university lecturer, won the Somerset Maugham Award and made him famous as a leading voice of the Angry Young Men movement. His subsequent novels include That Uncertain Feeling, Take a Girl Like You, The Old Devils (which won the Booker Prize), and The Alteration — an alternate history set in a world where the Reformation never happened and Europe remains under papal control. His fiction ranged from social comedy to science fiction to horror, always distinguished by its wit and its ear for the absurdities of English life. He was knighted in 1990 and died in 1995. His audiobooks and books offer listeners and readers some of the sharpest comic fiction of the twentieth century — novels that skewer pretension, hypocrisy, and the English class system with devastating precision.