Writer and critic Adam Mars-Jones was born in London in 1954.
Educated at Westminster School and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, he studied and then taught Creative Writing at the University of Virginia. He was film critic for The Independent between 1986 and 1997 and for The Times between 1998 and 2000. He is an occasional contributor to The Guardian and the Times Literary Supplement, and a regular reviewer for The Observer.
He was selected by Granta as one of its 20 'Best of British Young Novelists' in both 1983 and 1993. His fiction includes the collections of short stories, Lantern Lecture (1981), his first book, winner of a Somerset Maugham Award; Monopolies of Loss (1992); and The Darker Proof: Stories from a Crisis (1987), co-written with Edmund White. Adam Mars-Jones' first novel, The Waters of Thirst, was published in 1993. Since then he has published another two novels Pilcrow (2008) and Cedilla (2011), which form the first two parts of a projected trilogy.
Blind Bitter Happiness (1997), a collection of essays, includes 'Venus Envy', originally published as a pamphlet in the CounterBlasts series in 1990. His essay Noriko Smiling (2011) discusses the film Late Spring directed by Yasujiro Ozu.
In 2015 he published the autobiographic Kid Gloves: A Voyage Round My Father about his relationship with his father.
Adam Mars-Jones was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2007 and lives in London.
