Martin Amis has often been called the Mick Jagger of the British book world. As famous for his love affairs, his friendships and his complicated family history as for his dazzling prose, he has dominated the literary scene for decades. In this exclusive Intelligence Squared event he will talk about his much anticipated new autobiographical novel Inside Story. It is perhaps Amis’s most intimate book to date, a meditation on love, loss, ageing and death. We encounter the vivid characters who have helped define Amis – his father Kingsley, his literary hero Saul Bellow, the poet Philip Larkin and his novelist stepmother Elizabeth Jane Howard. And of course there is his lifelong friend and conversation partner, Christopher Hitchens, whose death from cancer he chronicles in some of the tenderest prose he has ever written.
In conversation with novelist Alex Preston Amis reflected on his life and work and explored the hardest questions we all face: how to live, how to grieve, and how to die.
This event was in partnership with Penguin Live.