GAMBIER, Ohio—-Ian McEwan, a novelist whose work has earned him worldwide acclaim, has been named the winner of the 2006 Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement. The announcement was made by David Lynn, editor of the Kenyon Review and professor of English at Kenyon College, the headquarters for the literary magazine.

The Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement will be presented to McEwan at a gala dinner on Thursday, November 9, at the Four Seasons restaurant in New York City. Members of the literary community and other luminaries are expected to be on hand, including past winners of the award.

McEwan will be recognized for his outstanding contributions to literature. His stories and novels have won many awards, including the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1998, for Amsterdam, and has been shortlisted three times. His novel Atonement received the WH Smith Literary Award (2002), National Book Critics' Circle Fiction Award (2003), Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction (2003), and the Santiago Prize for the European Novel (2004). A film version of Atonement is currently in production. In 2006, he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel Saturday.

“Ian McEwan’s fiction is notable for its fierce ethical engagements and its exceptional artistry,” said David H. Lynn, editor of the Review. “More than any other recent author, McEwan explores the unanticipated and often brutal collisions between the ordinary and the extraordinary."

The Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement was first presented in 2002 to novelist E.L. Doctorow, a 1952 graduate of Kenyon, who is known for such works as The Book of Daniel, Ragtime, and Loon Lake and more recently for The March. In 2003 the recipient was novelist and short-story writer Joyce Carol Oates, author of Wonderland, Do With Me What You Will, and We Were the Mulvaneys, among many other titles. In 2005, Seamus Heaney, recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature, received the award. Last year KR honored Roger Angell, the renowned baseball writer who has also been fiction editor of the New Yorker, and Umberto Eco, the Italian author of such best-selling novels as The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum

Proceeds from the dinner, and from the live and silent auctions that accompany it, benefit the Kenyon Review’s endowment fund, ensuring the legacy of one of America’s most revered literary journals. It also supports scholarships and fellowships to KR's summer writing programs, the Writers Workshop for adults and the Young Writers program for high-school students. The magazine’s literary outreach programs include the Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize for Young Writers, established in 2003, which attracts thousand of entries from across the globe.

For more information about the 2006 Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement, please email KR.