Ian McEwan

Literary novelist and author of the novels Atonement and Saturday...

Ian McEwan was born on 21 June in 1948 in Aldershot, Hampshire, England. He spent a great deal of his childhood in the Far East, Germany and North Africa where his army officer father was posted. He returned to England and read English at Sussex University.

After graduation, he was the first student on the MA Creative Writing course established at the University of East Anglia by Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson. He is a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of Arts, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was awarded the Shakespeare Prize by the Alfred Toepfer Foundation, Hamburg, in 1999. He was awarded a CBE in 2000.

Atonement (2001), shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction and the Whitbread Novel Award and winner of the WH Smith Literary Award, is set in the 1930s and tells the story of Briony, a young girl with ambitions as a writer, and the consequences of the discovery she makes about Robbie, a young man destined to play a part in the Dunkirk evacuations. Saturday (2005), set on one day in February 2003, won the 2006 James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction).

On Chesil Beach was Book of the Year at the 2008 British Book Awards, where McEwan was also named the Author of the Year.

His latest work is Solar, which explores the issue of global warming.

Fact file

Name: Ian McEwan

Education: BA, University of Sussex; MA , University of East Anglia

Date of birth: 21 June 1948

Place of birth: Aldershot

Current home: London

Awards: First Love, Last Rites, Somerset Maugham Award (1976); The Child in Time, Whitbread Novel Award (1987) and Prix Fémina Etranger (1993) and Germany's Shakespeare Prize (1999); shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction three times, winning for Amsterdam (1998); Atonement, WHSmith Literary Award (2002); National Book Critics' Circle Fiction Award (2003); Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction (2003); Santiago Prize for the European Novel (2004); James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel Saturday (2006); CBE (2000); Book of the Year (2008) On Chesil Beach; Author of the Year (2008) - British Book Awards.