Martin Amis' memorial service features tributes from Zadie Smith and Bill Nighy

Zadie Smith, Tina Brown, Ian McEwan and Bill Nighy paid tribute to the “joyful, mischievous” Martin Amis at the late author’s memorial service at St Martin-in-the-Fields on Monday afternoon (10th June).  

They regaled over 700 attendees — including Anna Wintour, Nigella Lawson, his UK editor Michal Shavit and authors Karl Ove Knausgård and Sebastian Faulks — with insights into the novelist’s lifelong friendships and capacity for scandal. Amis died in May last year aged 73.

Longtime friend McEwan opened the service in the 18th-century church, describing how Amis was the master of the “lightening paradox [and] exquisitely convoluted irony though with warmth”, a successor to Dickens who Amis both “adored and despaired of”. “He was the funniest man I ever met,” McEwan added, describing how when Salman Rushdie went into hiding following a fatwa, Amis remarked the fellow writer had “vanished into the front page”. 

McEwan said Amis was “joyous in the act of composition,” frequently made himself laugh at his desk and “turned obscenity into lifelong sacrament ...with a furious work ethic”. The author added: “That he is gone is still hard to comprehend but his words will remain under our skin.” 

Author and editor Tina Brown revealed how she met the 23-year-old when she was 19 at a party, as he outed himself as ‘Bruno Holbrook’, the nom de plume of an outrageous New Statesman columnist whose writing Brown admired. “At every one of the magazines I edited the goal was to get him to write for me,” Brown said. “Whenever his copy arrived it was Christmas Day in the office: so eagerly awaited, never a disappointment. ” Brown revealed that when Amis received chemotherapy whilst living in the US at the end of his life, he complained bitterly of the “posters full of happy, healthy people windsurfing”. 

Actor Bill Nighy read several passages from Amis’ work and said of his own devotion to Amis’ work: “I would buy his book on the day of publication like one would do with a new Rolling Stones album.” Amis’ debut, The Rachel Papers, in 1973 was published by Jonathan Cape, when was aged just 24. Other acclaimed works included the 1984 novel Money, Time’s Arrow (1991) and The Zone of Interest (2014, all published by Cape).

Zadie Smith described first meeting Amis as a university student in a Swiss Cottage Library event, where she sat at his feet due to lack of space, before going on to have a life-long friendship with him. “He would make me cry with laughter criticising writers I loved,” she said. “He loved to deliberately wind me up. ‘Are Women Funny? Discuss’. At which he would get lively discussion followed by laughter, and that was the point: life and laughter.” She added: “Above all he was a pleasure — on the page but also in person... Talking to Martin was like reading Martin but more so. He was sincere, joyful, mischievous but never cruel. 

“The life-force that was Martin is preserved in those antic pages, for all time, for everybody, and that’s great. But I miss my friend.” 

Smith’s husband Nick Laird, who spoke of late-night poetry discussions with Amis, read "Introduction to the Songs of Experience" by William Blake. 

The poet and writer James Fenton described meeting Amis whilst studying at Oxford and interrupting him mid-essay preparation to introduce him to Christopher Hitchens. Such was the strength of his academic writing that “his university papers secured him a job at the Times Literary Supplement,” Fenton said. Later, Fenton described his own “delight” at being invited to the Amis’ “literary lunches with fellow writers but with no speeches, just chat”.  

Amis’ wife, author and former editor Isabel Fonseca and three of his five children — Fernanda Amis, Delilah Jeary and son Louis Amis – also paid tribute to the author. A memorial booklet containing further tributes from friends and authors such as Anne Enright, William Boyd and Howard Jacobson was also distributed.