Ian McEwan was born on 21 June 1948 in Aldershot, England. He studied at the University of Sussex, where he received a BA degree in English Literature in 1970. He received his MA degree in English Literature at the University of East Anglia.

McEwan's works have earned him worldwide critical acclaim. He won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976 for his first collection of short stories First Love, Last Rites; the Whitbread Novel Award (1987) and the Prix Fémina Etranger (1993) for The Child in Time; and Germany's Shakespeare Prize in 1999.

He has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction numerous 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). He was awarded a CBE in 2000. In 2006, he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel Saturday, and his novel

McEwan's most recent novel is The Children Act.

I'm surprised that a couple of sentences of mine during a short Q & A session at the end of lecture I gave at the Royal Institution should have caused a stir. My subject was the literary representation of the self in the work of Montaigne, Shakespeare, Pepys, Boswell and others. In response to a question, I proposed that the possession of a penis or, more fundamentally, the inheritance of the xy chromosome, is inalienably connected to maleness. As a statement, this seems to me biologically unexceptional. However, biology is not always destiny. That the transgender community should want or need to abandon their birth gender or radically redefine it is their right, which should be respected and celebrated. It adds to the richness and diversity of life. It's an extension of freedom and the possibilities of selfhood. Everyone should deplore the discrimination that transgender communities have suffered around the world. That the community should sometimes find itself in conflict with feminists (over changing rooms, beauty pageants, access to women's colleges) -- well, that's a conversation on which I can shed no useful light.

As for 'victimhood', my remarks concerned the charged atmosphere at many U.S. campuses, where students are seeking 'safe spaces', 'trigger warnings'  and the 'no-platforming' of speakers with views contrary to their own. This represents an assault on freedom of expression - an assault that will, regrettably, be familiar to members of the transgender community worldwide.

Ian McEwan
2 April 2016

Last update: 14 November 2015
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