The Writers of Wales Database

BAX, MARTIN

Website: http://www.martinbax.com

Martin Bax is a world–renowned consultant paediatrician, who has now retired from clinical work and is an honorary reader in Child Health at Imperial College, London. He founded and has edited the long–running literary journal Ambit. He lives in London and the Welsh Marches. In the 1970s, using text from his 1976 novel The Hospital Ship (Picador, 1976), he developed the Vietnam Symphony with jazz trumpeter Henry Lowther which was performed at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and broadcast on BBC Radio 3. He has also written for children and his book Edmund Went Far Away, illustrated by Michael Foremen, was published in the UK and USA.

Reviews:
"…Martin Bax is one of a kind. His fictional world is unsettling, cosmopolitan, erudite, curious in all the best senses. His stories are formally adventurous, modern and post-modern, sometimes very droll, and often distinctly filthy. Isn't that enough for anyone?…"
Geoff Nicholson


With respect to The Hospital Ship (Picador, 1976):

"…engagingly quirky … packed with ideas out of the range of your average novel..."
Julian Barnes, New Statesman


With respect to on Love on the Borders (Seren, 2005):

"...Martin Bax has an editor’s eye for extracting tantalising texts..."
Times Literary Supplement

"...what matters in this kind of writing is not rigid structure and exact plotting but the articulation of the myriad of ways in which the mind relates to the world..."
New Welsh Review


Selected Publications:
Adult Novels
The Hospital Ship (Picador, 1976)
Love on the Borders (Seren, 2005)
Memoirs of a Gone World (Salt, 2010)

Children's Novels
Edmund Went Far Away (unknown)