The Booker Prize website said, “Amis was one of the most acclaimed and celebrated authors of the last 50 years and the author of 14 novels.”
The author of searing and insightful works such as “Money: A Suicide Note,” “London Fields” and “Time’s Arrow” died Friday after a battle with esophageal cancer, his wife, Isabel Fonseca told the media.
His death was announced on the same day that a film based on his 2014 book “The Zone of Interest” was being shown at the Cannes Festival.
Set in Auschwitz, the novel tells the story of a Nazi officer who falls in love with the extermination camp commander’s wife.
Amis, the son of famed comic novelist Kingsley Amis, equaled and even surpassed his father in fame with novels filled with brutal humor.
“The novel is an incredibly intimate portrait of a writer,” the younger Amis once told the BBC, reflecting on his career.
“Although I don’t write an autobiography, I am everywhere in my books.”
In 2008, The Times of London named him one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.
Born in Wales in 1949, Amis emerged as a literary figure amid the British fiction boom of the 1980s, which included fellow novelists Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro and Ian McEwan.
Amis graduated from Oxford University with a degree in English in 1971 and worked as an editor before publishing her first novel, “The Rachel Papers”, in 1973.
It was with “Money”, published in 1984 with a comic take on consumerism, that Amis burst onto the literary scene more widely.
In addition to his novels, Amis published two collections of stories and eight works of nonfiction.
His book on the September 11, 2001 attacks, titled “The Second Plane”, consists of articles, short stories and essays.
In recent decades, Amis became a public intellectual, appearing frequently on television, sometimes with his longtime friend Christopher Hitchens, a British-American author and noted atheist who died in 2011.
The website reported that he was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1991 and longlisted in 2003.
The 1990s marked the peak of her literary career, even though she was accused of anti-feminism and later of Islamophobia – charges she strongly denied.
Publisher Vintage Books said it was “devastated” by Amis’ death.
“He leaves an immense legacy and an indelible mark on the British cultural landscape, and will be greatly missed,” Vintage said on its Twitter account.