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Author Martin Amis poses for a portrait at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, held at Cheltenham Town Hall in Cheltenham, England on October 14, 2007.
CNN –
British author Martin Amis, best known for his 1984 novel Money and 1989’s London Fields, has died, his publisher Penguin Books UK announced on Saturday. He was 73.
“(Amis) leaves a tremendous legacy and an indelible mark on the British cultural landscape and will be greatly missed,” he said The British publisher announced this on Twitter.
The author, who published his first novel, The Rachel Papers, at the age of 24, died on Friday, according to Penguin Books.
Amis’ wife, author Isabel Fonseca, told the New York Times that his cause of death was esophageal cancer.
CNN has reached out to Fonseca for comment.
Amis leaves behind Fonesca and his children – Louis, Jacob, Fernanda, Clio and Delilah.
“To so many of my generation, Martin Amis was the coolest, funniest, most quotable and beautiful writer in British literature,” said his former editor Dan Franklin in a Penguin statement announcing Amis’ death.
His publisher remembered him as “a novelist, essayist, memoirist, critic and stylist who for 40 years dominated the British publishing world,” the statement said.
Amis was born on August 25, 1949 in Oxford, England. According to Penguin, he was the son of English writer Kingsley Amis.
As an author dealing with current events and important historical moments, Amis’s work addressed big issues and questions, Penguin said, including “The Second Plane,” his collection of essays and stories about the events of September 11, 2001.
His 1991 novel Time’s Arrow and 2014 The Zone of Interest dealt with the Holocaust.
A graduate of Exeter College, Oxford University, he was a professor of creative writing at the University of Manchester from 2007 to 2011, the publisher said.
Amis’ awards include the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his memoir Experience, and his writing has been twice nominated for the Booker Prize, including a shortlist for Time’s Arrow.
According to Penguin, his works were “known for their dark, wry satire and inventiveness.”
“It’s hard to imagine a world without Martin Amis,” its UK editor, Michal Shavit, said in Penguin’s statement. “He was the king – an extraordinary stylist, super cool, a brilliantly funny, learned and fearless writer and a truly wonderful man.”