Adam Mars-Jones

Early life and education

Mars-Jones was born in London, to Sir William Mars-Jones (1915–1999), a Welsh High Court judge, and Sheila Cobon (1923–1998), an attorney, daughter of Charles Cobon, a marine engineer. Mars-Jones attended Westminster School, and studied English at Trinity Hall, Cambridge.

Career

Mars-Jones is a regular contributor to The Guardian, The Observer, The Times Literary Supplement, and the London Review of Books. He also participated in BBC Television's Newsnight Review.

His first collection of stories, Lantern Lecture (1981), won a Somerset Maugham Award. In 1983, he edited the collection Mae West Is Dead: Recent Lesbian and Gay Fiction. His own short fiction was collected in The Darker Proof: Stories from a Crisis (1987), co-written with Edmund White, and in Monopolies of Loss (1992); both works address the AIDS crisis. His essay "Venus Envy", a polemic against Martin Amis, was originally published in the CounterBlasts series in 1990.

Mars-Jones' first novel, The Waters of Thirst, was published in 1993. His second novel, Pilcrow (2008), was followed by two sequels, Cedilla (2011) and Caret (2023), which together form the first three volumes of a projected series.

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2007.

Noriko Smiling, a book concerning the Yasujirō Ozu-directed film Late Spring, was published in 2011.

In 2012, he was awarded the inaugural Hatchet Job of the Year Award for his review of Michael Cunningham's By Nightfall.

On 2 January 2015, Mars-Jones was captain of the winning team on the television quiz show Christmas University Challenge, representing Trinity Hall, Cambridge, who defeated Balliol College, Oxford, the University of Edinburgh and the University of Hull. His teammates were international rower Tom James, world champion cyclist Emma Pooley and actor Dan Starkey.

His 2020 novel Box Hill was adapted into the 2025 film Pillion, starring Harry Melling and Alexander Skarsgaard.

Personal life

Mars-Jones' 1997 "Blind Bitter Happiness" re-tells the difficult life of his mother and his relationship to her. His memoir Kid Gloves: A Voyage Round My Father (2015) deals with his father's struggle to come to terms with his son's homosexuality and his father's later slide into dementia in old age.

Bibliography

References

References

1. ''Graya: A Magazine for Members of Gray's Inn'', issue 107, 1999, p. 110.
2. Morton, James. (25 January 1999). "Obituary: Sir William Mars-Jones". The Independent.
3. ''Who was Who'', St Martin's Press, 1996, p. 386.
4. Robertson, Geoffrey (12 January 1999), [https://www.theguardian.com/news/1999/jan/12/guardianobituaries "Sir William Mars-Jones obituary"], ''The Guardian''.
5. "Adam Mars-Jones".
6. Wroe, Nicholas. (22 August 2015). "Adam Mars-Jones: 'When you're writing about the dead, you have the last word'". The Guardian.
7. Crown, Sarah. (16 August 2023). "Caret by Adam Mars-Jones review – a semi-infinite novel". The Guardian.
8. "Royal Society of Literature All Fellows". Royal Society of Literature.
9. Cozy, David. (25 March 2012). "An unserious look at the work of Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu". Japan Times.
10. Mars-Jones, Adam (23 January 2011), [https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jan/23/by-nightfall-michael-cunningham-review "By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham – review"], ''The Observer''.
11. . (2 January 2015). ["University Challenge Victory"](http://www.trinhall.cam.ac.uk/news/detail.asp?ItemID=2914).
12. Bradshaw, Peter. (18 May 2025). "Pillion review – 50 shades of BDSM Wallace and Gromit in brilliant Bromley biker romance". The Guardian.
13. "Blind Bitter Happiness" in ''Sons and Mothers'', ed. Matthew and Victoria Glendinning, London, 1996, {{ISBN. 1 86049 254 1
14. ''Kid Gloves: a Voyage Round my Father'', London, 2015, {{ISBN. 978 1 846 14875 0.
15. Mars-Jones, Adam. (2011). "Noriko Smiling". Notting Hill Editions.
16. Cummins, Anthony. (16 March 2020). "Box Hill by Adam Mars-Jones review – the mystery of love". The Guardian.