Biography

(Paris - 1979) First writer to interview Roman Polanski when he fled the US (1978) after being charged with the statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl. The entire interview was reprinted in the Observer Film Magazine, a supplement of the UK's daily newspaper The Observer (6 Dec. 2009).

After reading "nothing but science fiction till he was fifteen or sixteen," as his father Kingsley Amis complained, Martin did extremely poorly in school until he determined to enter Oxford's Exeter College. He studied Latin and poetry to pass the entrance exam and graduated with a degree in English with first-class honors. He went to work as a book reviewer for the London Observer in 1971, and the following year was made an editorial assistant at the London Times Literary Supplement, where he was promoted to fiction and poetry editor in 1974. He also took editorial positions at the New Statesman and the London Observer before becoming a full-time writer.

Longtime companion of Tina Brown in the 1970s.

Was expelled from Sir Walter St John's grammar school aged 15 for taking 4 months off to act in A High Wind in Jamaica (1965).

Completed a script for a new film version of Jane Austen's "Northanger Abbey". The project was subsequently dropped.

If God existed, and if He cared for humankind, He would never have given us religion.

Only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and the rose grow without the thorn.

Weapons are like money: no one knows the meaning of enough.

We don't read Dickens for Little Nell and Esther Summerson; we read him for Quilp and Carker - all the villains and the wags and the eccentrics. That's where Dickens' energy goes. To channel energy into a good character is very difficult, and not very many writers have made goodness, happiness, the positive, work on the page.

It's becoming clearer and clearer to me that the world is there to be celebrated by writers, and in fact this is what all the good ones do, and that the great fashion for gloom and grimness was in fact a false path that certain writers took, I think in response to the horrors of the first half of the twentieth century. Theodor Adorno's line, 'No poetry after Auschwitz' is in fact contradicted by Paul Celan, who was writing poetry in a Romanian labour camp.