Background

Ian McEwan was born on June 21, 1948, in Aldershot, England, the son of David McEwan and Rose Lilian Violet Moore. His father was a Scotsman and was a sergeant major in the British Army. As a result, he spent some of his childhood living abroad in places like Singapore and Libya while his father was on military campaigns during the Cold War.

McEwan's mother was previously married and had two children from that marriage. One, her oldest son Ernest Wort, was killed in action during the D-Day invasions of France in 1944. Ian's mother and father also had a child out of wedlock, David Sharp, who was given up for adoption in 1942 because of the affair between his parents before Ian's mother was divorced.

McEwan has referred to instances of alcohol and spousal abuse initiated by his father. In one interview, the author remembers attempting to intervene in such abuse; he was prevented from doing so by his mother who insisted it was not his place to get involved. For all intents and purposes, Ian McEwan was an only child.

McEwan was separated from his parents in 1959 when he was 12 years old and they were living in Libya. At that time, he was sent back to England.

Education

In England McEwan attended Woolverstone Hall Boarding School, where he stayed until 1966.

From 1966-1970, McEwan attended the University of Sussex. It was here where he first realized and voiced an interest in becoming a writer. While studying at Sussex, he wrote mainly for performance, completing scripts for the stage, radio play, and television sketches. It wasn't until 1970, when McEwan was earning the Master of Arts degree from the University of Anglia, that he shifted to prose.

At Anglia, he was introduced to a group of young American writers - Norman Mailer, John Updike, Henry Mellow, and Saul Bellow - who would have a great effect on him and his writing.

Career

In 1971, McEwan published his first story in the Transatlantic Review. Editor Ted Solotaroff of the New American Review, began printing his stories in 1972.

He published a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites in 1975. He achieved notoriety in 1979 when the BBC suspended production of his play Solid Geometry because of its supposed obscenity.

His second collection of short stories, In Between the Sheets, was published in 1978. The Cement Garden (1978) and The Comfort of Strangers (1981) were his two earliest novels, both of which were adapted into films. The nature of these works caused him to be nicknamed "Ian Macabre". These were followed by McEwan's first book for children, Rose Blanche (1985), and a return to literary fiction for The Child in Time (1987).

Following The Child in Time, McEwan began to move away from the darker, more unsettling material of his earlier career towards the style that would see him reach a wider readership and gain significant critical acclaim. This new phase began with the publication of the mid-Cold War set espionage drama The Innocent (1990) and Black Dogs (1992), a quasi-companion piece reflecting upon the aftermath of the Nazi era in Europe and the end of the Cold War. He followed these works with his second book for children, The Daydreamer (1994).

His 1997 novel, Enduring Love, about the relationship between a science writer and a stalker, was popular with critics, although it was not shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His next novel, Atonement (2001), received considerable acclaim. In 2007, the critically acclaimed movie Atonement, directed by Joe Wright and starring Keira Knightley and James McAvoy, was released in cinemas worldwide.

His next work, Saturday (2005), follows an especially eventful day in the life of a successful neurosurgeon. McEwan has also written a number of produced screenplays, a stage play, children's fiction, an oratorio and a libretto titled For You with music composed by Michael Berkeley.

In 2006, McEwan was accused of plagiarism; specifically that a passage in Atonement (2001) closely echoed a passage from a memoir, No Time for Romance, published in 1977 by Lucilla Andrews. He acknowledged using the book as a source for his work. McEwan had included a brief note at the end of Atonement, referring to Andrews's autobiography, among several other works.

The incident recalled critical controversy over his debut novel The Cement Garden, key elements of the plot of which closely mirrored some of those of Our Mother's House, a 1963 novel by British author Julian Gloag, which had also been made into a film. He denied charges of plagiarism, claiming he was unaware of the earlier work. Writing in The Guardian in November 2006, a month after Andrews' death, McEwan professed innocence of plagiarism while acknowledging his debt to the author of No Time for Romance. Several authors defended him, including John Updike, Martin Amis, Margaret Atwood, Thomas Keneally, Kazuo Ishiguro, Zadie Smith, and Thomas Pynchon.

McEwan's first novel of the 2010s, Solar, was published by Jonathan Cape and Doubleday in March 2010. In June 2008 at the Hay Festival, he gave a surprise reading of this work-in-progress. The novel includes "a scientist who hopes to save the planet" from the threat of climate change, with inspiration for the novel coming from a Cape Farewell expedition McEwan made in 2005 in which "artists and scientists spent several weeks aboard a ship near the north pole discussing environmental concerns."

Solar was followed by McEwan's twelfth novel, Sweet Tooth, a meta-fictional historical novel set in the 1970s, and was published in late August 2012. Sweet Tooth was followed two years later by The Children Act, which concerned high court judges, U.K. family law, and the right to die.

The release of The Children Act was marred by a public controversy when McEwan's estranged ex-wife made an unexpected appearance at a public publicity event that McEwan was participating in to promote his novel; she heckled him, and demanded, "When are you going to lift the injunction you have on me and my partner?" Although McEwan recognized his ex-wife's presence, he did not directly respond, and she was escorted from the premises.

McEwan then wrote Nutshell, published in 2016, a short novel closer in style and tone to his earlier works. His next work was a short novella My Purple Scented Novel which published to mark McEwan's 70th birthday in June 2018.

His next book, Machines Like Me, is to be published on April 18, 2019.

Achievements

• Ian McEwan is the critically acclaimed author of seventeen books, and is often considered one of the finest writers of his generation.
  
  In 1976 he received the Somerset Maugham Award for his First Love, Last Rites. In 1987 McEwan received the Whitbread Novel Award for The Child in Time. He was awarded the Shakespeare Prize by the Alfred Toepfer Foundation, Hamburg, in 1999. He was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 2000.
  
  In 2005, he was the first recipient of Dickinson College's Harold and Ethel L. Stellfox Visiting Scholar and Writers Program Award, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
  
  In 2006, the Board of Trustees of the Kenyon Review honored McEwan with the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement, writing that "McEwan's stories, novels, and plays are notable for their fierce artistic dramas, exploring unanticipated and often brutal collisions between the ordinary and the extraordinary."
  
  In 2008, McEwan was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Literature by University College London, where he used to teach English literature.
  
  In 2008, The Times named McEwan among their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945." The Daily Telegraph ranked him number 19 in their list of the "100 most powerful people in British culture."
  
  In 2010, McEwan received the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award.
  
  On February 20, 2011, he was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society. He accepted the prize, despite controversy and pressure from groups and individuals opposed to the Israeli government.
  
  In 2012, the University of Sussex presented McEwan with its 50th Anniversary Gold Medal in recognition of his contributions to literature.
  
  In 2014, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas paid $2 million for McEwan's literary archives. The archives includes drafts of all of Mr. McEwan's later novels.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Atonement

    (On a hot summer day in 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tal...)

    2001
  • Saturday

    (Henry Perowne - a neurosurgeon, urbane, privileged, deepl...)

    2005
  • The Child in Time

    (Stephen Lewis, a successful writer of children's books, i...)

    1987
  • The Daydreamer

    (In these seven exquisitely interlinked episodes, the grow...)

    1994
  • Black Dogs

    (Set in late 1980s Europe at the time of the fall of the B...)

    1992
  • The Good Son

    (After the death of his mother, young Mark Dolan is sent t...)

    1988
  • The Innocent

    (A member of a British-American surveillance team in Cold ...)

    1990
  • The Comfort of Strangers

    (A vacationing English couple find more than they bargaine...)

    1981
  • Amsterdam

    (On a chilly February day, two old friends meet in the thr...)

    1998
  • Enduring Love

    (The calm, organized life of science writer Joe Rose is sh...)

    1997
  • On Chesil Beach

    (It is 1962, and Florence and Edward are celebrating their...)

    2007
  • In Between the Sheets

    (A two-timing pornographer becomes an unwilling object in ...)

    1978
  • The Children Act

    (Fiona Maye is a leading High Court judge who presides ove...)

    2014
  • Machines Like Me

    (Machines Like Me takes place in an alternative 1980s Lond...)

    2019
  • Nutshell

    (Trudy has been unfaithful to her husband, John. What’s mo...)

    2016
  • Sweet Tooth

    (The year is 1972. The Cold War is far from over. England'...)

    2012
  • Solar

    (Dr. Michael Beard’s best work is behind him. Trading on h...)

    2010
  • First Love, Last Rites 1975
  • The Cement Garden 1978
  • Rose Blanche 1985
  • The Imitation Game 1980
  • My Purple Scented Novel 2016
  • The Ploughman's Lunch 1983
  • Or Shall We Die? 1983

Religion

McEwan is an atheist, and once said that certain streams of Christianity were "equally absurd" and that he didn't like "these medieval visions of the world according to which God is coming to save the faithful and to damn the others."

Views

In 2008, McEwan publicly spoke out against Islamism for its views on women and on homosexuality. He was quoted as saying that fundamentalist Islam wanted to create a society that he "abhorred." His comments appeared in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, to defend fellow writer Martin Amis against allegations of racism.

Also in 2008, McEwan was among more than 200,000 signatories of a petition to support Italian journalist Roberto Saviano who received multiple death threats and was placed in police protection after exposing the Mafia-like crime syndicate, Camorra, in his 2006 book Gomorrah. McEwan said he hoped the petition would help "galvanize" the Italian police into taking seriously the "fundamental matter of civil rights and free speech."

McEwan also signed a petition to support the release of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, an Iranian woman sentenced to death by stoning after being convicted of committing adultery.

He is an avid activist in the fight for climate control. In 2009 he joined the 10:10 project, a movement that supports positive action on climate change by encouraging people to reduce their carbon emissions.

In 2013, McEwan sharply criticized Stephen Hawking for boycotting a conference in Israel as well as the boycott campaign in general.

He is also a Distinguished Supporter of the British Humanist Association.

McEwan cites Solotaroff as a crucial force in his development as a young writer - he was “helpful and perceptive” and the first editor to take him seriously. McEwan described one particular issue of the Review that featured his name along with Günter Grass, Susan Sontag, and Philip Roth. “I felt like an impostor, but I was also very excited.”

Kafka was an early favourite; since The Child in Time, McEwan has been most influenced by the science renaissance. Amsterdam marked a new direction: "social satire" he calls it, "heavily influenced by Evelyn Waugh."

Quotations: "For an 18-year-old, I was rather well-read in what was then an uncontested canon. I was disappointed to find that my fellow students hadn’t read much beyond their A-level texts. So we weren’t staying up late into the night talking about Wyatt or Milton or Tennyson. I felt very frustrated and even thought I’d leave."

"At Cambridge I wouldn't have got that contact with the broad sweep of European literature and thought, and it took me some while to appreciate fully the extent to which my mind had been reordered, as it were; wrenched away from the parochial, Leavisite criticism that dominated English literary studies then. Even now I continue to draw on that bold, optimistic, very 60s notion of a new map of learning."

"I think of novels in architectural terms. You have to enter at the gate, and this gate must be constructed in such a way that the reader has immediate confidence in the strength of the building."

"I hate comic novels; it's like being wrestled to the ground and being tickled, being forced to laugh."

"One thing that’s missing from the discussion of literature in the academy is the pleasure principle. Not only the pleasure of the reader but also of the writer. The joy is in the surprise. It can be as small as a felicitous coupling of noun and adjective. Or a whole new scene, or the sudden emergence of an unplanned character who simply grows out of a phrase. Literary criticism, which is bound to pursue meaning, can never really encompass the fact that some things are on the page because they gave the writer pleasure. A writer whose morning is going well, whose sentences are forming well, is experiencing a calm and private joy. This joy itself then liberates a richness of thought that can prompt new surprises. Writers crave these moments, these sessions. If I may quote the second page of Atonement, this is the project’s highest point of fulfillment. Nothing else - cheerful launch party, packed readings, positive reviews - will come near it for satisfaction."

"I have contradictory fantasies and aspirations about my work. I like precision and clarity in sentences, and I value the implied meaning, the spring, in the space between them. Certain observed details I revel in and consider ends in themselves. I prefer a work of fiction to be self-contained, supported by its own internal struts and beams, resembling the world, but somehow immune from it. I like stories, and I am always looking for the one which I imagine to be irresistible. Against all this, I value a documentary quality, and an engagement with a society and its values; I like to think about the tension between the private worlds of individuals and the public sphere by which they are contained. Another polarity that fascinates me is of men and women, their mutual dependency, fear and love, and the play of power between them. Perhaps I can reconcile, or at least summarise, these contradictory impulses in this way: the process of writing a novel is educative in two senses; as the work unfolds, it teaches you its own rules, it tells how it should be written; at the same time it is an act of discovery, in a harsh world, of the precise extent of human worth."

"I’m an atheist. I really don’t believe for a moment that our moral sense comes from a God. It’s human, universal, being able to think our way into the minds of others."

"My own view of religion is that people must be free to worship all the gods they want. But it’s only the secular spirit that will guarantee that freedom."

Membership

McEwan is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

• 

  Royal Society of Literature , United Kingdom

• 

  Royal Society of Arts , United Kingdom

• 

  American Academy of Arts and Sciences , United States

Personality

McEwan is a writer with a well-established and, at times, even somewhat infamous literary reputation before his novels began to gain a North American readership. For many years he was known primarily for a literary style that delivered horrifically visceral passages but remained compellingly eloquent throughout. In his middle age McEwan began toning down the explicit with horrors that were far more accessible: the loss of a child, the betrayal of a friend, the disintegration of a family.

He once said that he wouldn't mind being the lead guitarist in an incredibly successful rock band.

Quotes from others about the person

• "McEwan, as an artist, can play a role in creating a more morally attuned society: through his activism as a public intellectual, devoting his time to causes such as gender equality, nuclear disarmament, and environmentalism; and through his fiction, which he views as a medium for enhancing people's compassionate abilities to imagine the lives of others." - Ian Wells

Interests

• Writers

  Franz Kafka, Evelyn Waugh

Connections

McEwan married twice. First he married what he referred to as a complete "free spirit," the young and liberated Penny Allen. He and Allen had two sons together, but their marriage was short-lived. As McEwan's fame began to grow in Britain's literary world, Allen became frustrated and the two were divorced shortly thereafter. Their break-up became somewhat of a media circus when Allen fled the country with her new husband, Ismay Tremain, for France, taking the boys with her. Eventually, she was fined and ordered to return to Britain.

Following the episode with Allen, McEwan married long-time Guardian editor Annalena McAfee. Together, the two have continued to raise McEwan's sons.

Father:

David McEwan

Mother:

Rose Lilian Violet Moore

Spouse:

Annalena McAfee

Son:

William McEwan

Son:

Greg McEwan

ex-spouse:

Penny Allen

Brother:

Ernest Wort

Brother:

David Sharp

Friend:

Martin Amis

Friend:

Salman Rushdie

Friend:

Christopher Hitchens

colleague:

John Updike

colleague:

Ted Solotaroff

References

• The Work of Ian McEwan
  2002
• The Fiction of Ian McEwan
  2005
• Ian McEwan
  2007
• Understanding Ian McEwan
  2002
• Ian McEwan
  2002
• Conversations with Ian McEwan
  2010
• Ian McEwan
  1994
• Ian McEwan
  2010