Jake's Thing

Kingsley Amis

Kingsley Amis (Author) Kingsley Amis has been described as 'the finest English comic novelist of the second half of the twentieth century'. Born in 1922, he wrote over twenty novels, including Lucky Jim (1954), winner of the Somerset Maugham Award for fiction, The Old Devils (1986), which won the Booker Prize, and The Biographer's Moustache (1995). He also published several collections of short stories, poetry and non-fiction. Amis was awarded a CBE in 1981 and received a knighthood in 1990. He died in 1995. Philip Larkin (Author) Philip Larkin was one of the pre-eminent poets of the post-war period. Born in 1922, he graduated from Oxford in 1943 and became a librarian. His first collection of poetry, The North Ship, was published in 1945, but it was his second, The Less Deceived (1955) that would bring him into the public eye. The same year, he became University Librarian at the University of Hull. He remained there for the next thirty years, producing two more collections of poetry, The Whitsun Weddings (1964) and High Windows (1974). Collected Poems, comprising all Larkin's published and much of his unpublished work, was published posthumously in 1988. Philip Larkin's many awards include the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, and he received a CBE in 1975. He died in 1985.