Kenneth Martin was born in Belfast in 1939. He grew up in Bangor, Co.
Down, where he was adopted into a poor family. He began work on his
first novel, Aubade, at the age of sixteen, and when it was accepted for
publication by Chapman and Hall with an advance of £100, he moved to
London. Aubade, published the day after Martin turned eighteen in 1957,
was a modest success, selling well enough to run into a second printing in
1958 and was also published in America. Martin followed his debut with
two more novels, Waiting for the Sky to Fall (1959) and A Matter of Time
(1960), but the reviews of these novels were largely disappointing, and
Martin turned from fiction to journalism. He moved to the United States
in 1970 and earned degrees from Columbia University, the University
of Minnesota, and San Francisco State University. In 1977 he became an
American citizen. He returned to fiction writing for one more novel in
1989, publishing Billy’s Brother with Gay Men’s Press, which also reissued
Aubade as part of its Gay Modern Classics series, and The Tin Islands from
Millivres Books International in 1996. Kenneth Martin lives and works as
a psychotherapist in San Francisco.