Photo: Eamonn McCabe.

About Ian McEwan
 
Ian McEwan was born on June 21, 1948 in Aldershot, England. He studied at the University of Sussex, where he received a BA degree in English Literature in 1970. While completing his MA degree in English Literature at the University of East Anglia, he took a creative writing course taught by the novelists Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson.

McEwan's works have earned him worldwide critical acclaim. Among them are the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976 for his first collection of short stories First Love, Last Rites; Whitbread Novel Award (1987) and Prix Fémina Etranger (1993) for The Child in Time; and Germany's Shakespeare Prize in 1999. He has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction three times, winning the award for Amsterdam in 1998. 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 his award-winning novel Atonement is currently in production. In 2006, he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel Saturday.

" No one now writing fiction in the English language surpasses Ian McEwan," said the Washington Post Book World. While McEwan’s early stories were remarkable for their formal experimentation and controlled narrative voice, his later work explores the unanticipated and often brutal collisions between ordinary, recognizable individuals and the extraordinary, the unexpected, the accidental. The insights McEwan offers are philosophically profound but heartrendingly simple. This is the art of the novel at its highest level.