Novelist Amis lands teaching post

Martin Amis' 12th novel will be published this year

Award-winning novelist Martin Amis is taking up his first teaching post as a professor of creative writing at Manchester University.

The writer, behind novels including Money and London Fields, will run post-graduate seminars from September.

"It will give me a chance to find out more about that shadowy and inscrutable demographic group, the young," he said.

Amis's father Kingsley was also a novelist and taught at Cambridge, Swansea and Princeton in the US.

"I think I may have something to offer as a teacher, and it's always been a quiet ambition of mine to give it my best try," Amis added.

'Wonderful opportunity'

He will also take part in four events open to the public each year, including a two-week summer school where writers teach MA students from the UK and abroad.

"It will be a wonderful opportunity for our creative writing students to learn their craft from so distinguished a novelist," said Professor Alan Gilbert, president and vice chancellor at the university.

Novelist Patricia Duncker and Irish poet Vona Groarke will join Amis as new appointees at the university's Centre for New Writing, which opens in September.

Amis's first novel, The Rachel Papers, was published in 1973. His latest book, The Pregnant Widow, will be published next year.

He joins the University of Manchester's other famous scholars including literary theorist Terry Eagleton, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and social scientist Professor Robert Putnam.