Sir Kingsley Amis was born in 1922 in South London. He studied at Oxford, and later became a professor at the universities of Swansea and Cambridge. Fraternal friend of Edmund Crispin and Philip Larkin (who would die in the Amis house in 1985), was one of the maximum representatives of the movement of the "Angry Young Men" or "Angry Young Men". Like many men of his generation, he served for a time in the army. He began his literary career as a poet, although what would take him to fame in 1954 was the publication of his first novel, Lucky Jim (winner of the Somerset Maugham Award). In his younger years, Kingsley Amis was a Stalinist and a member of the Communist Party. However, later, coinciding with the invasion of Hungary by the Soviet Union in 1956, Amis became a raucous anti-Communist, being branded as reactionary. He exposed his change of political thought in 1967, in the essay Why Lucky Jim turned right (Why Lucky Jim Turned Right). He wrote more than fifty works, including twenty novels, six volumes of poetry and his memoirs, in 1991. He also collaborated in the writing of some of the novels starring actor James Bond. He was awarded in 1986 with the prestigious Booker Prize for the best book of the year (Los viejos demonios), a prize to which he had been nominated on two previous occasions. In 1990 he was distinguished with the Knight Order of the British Empire. He died on October 22, 1995, in London. The Times considers him one of the ten best English writers after 1945.