Sir Kingsley Amis
Sir Kingsley Amis (1922-1995) Novelist, poet and critic, Kingsley Amis was born in London but was a lecturer at Swansea University from 1948-1961. Sometimes grouped among the "angry young men" of the 1950s, a label Kingsley Amis later rejected, Amis was a key member of the The Movement, which also included Robert Conquest, Elisabeth Jennings and Philip Larkin who became a life-long friend.
Amis' first collection of poems was published in 1947 and was followed by several others, although Kingsley Amis is better remembered today as a novelist.
Swansea University is the setting for Kingsley Amis’s first, and still best-known, novel Lucky Jim, published in 1954. That Uncertain Feeling (1956) is also set in Swansea. He wrote his Booker-prize winning novel The Old Devils (1986), with its South West Wales setting and very personal view of Welshness, while staying in Laugharne. Kingsley Amis was knighted in 1990.