The potential of Adam Mars-Jones, novelist, short-story writer, and essayist was recognized early in his career. Before his first novel was published, he was twice named to the Granta magazine list of the best young British novelists (in 1983 and 1993). Mars-Jones's first collection of stories, Lantern Lecture, was published in 1981 to great acclaim, and the following year he won the Somerset Maugham Award. He followed this success with a series of stories about HIV and AIDS—some published with fiction by Edmund White in The Darker Proof (1987) and others in Monopolies of Loss (1992). In 1993 he published a novel, The Waters of Thirst.

Adam Mars-Jones was born on 26 October 1954 in London, where he still lives. His father, William Lloyd Mars-Jones, became a High Court judge in 1969 and retired in 1990; his mother, Sheila (née Cobon), who died in 1998, was a lawyer. He was educated at Westminster School, confessing in...