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 On Chesil Beach was named Galaxy Book of the Year at the 2008 British Book Awards. McEwan has been named the Reader's Digest Author of the Year for 2008, the 2010 Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award, and in 2011 was awarded the Jerusalem Prize.

McEwan lives in London. His most recent novel is Solar.

He looked around at his fellow mourners now, many of them his own age, Molly's age, to within a year or two. How prosperous, how influential, how they had flourished under a government they had despised for almost seventeen years. Talking 'bout my generation. Such energy, such luck. Nurtured in the postwar settlement with the state's own milk and juice, and then sustained by their parents' tentative, innocent prosperity, to come of age in full employment, new universities, bright paperback books, the Augustan age of rock and roll, affordable ideals. When the ladder crumbled behind them, when the state withdrew her tit and became a scold, they were already safe, they consolidated and settled down to forming this or that--taste, opinion, fortunes.

-- from Amsterdam by Ian McEwan

Ryan Roberts, editor.
Conversations with Ian McEwan.
University Press of Mississippi, March 2010. 224 pp.
ISBN: 9781604734201

Conversations with Ian McEwan collects sixteen interviews, conducted over three decades, with the author (b. 1948) of such highly praised novels as Enduring Love, Atonement, Saturday, and On Chesil Beach.

McEwan discusses his views on authorship, the writing process, and the major themes found in his fiction, but he also expands upon his interests in music, film, global politics, the sciences, and the state of literature in contemporary society.

McEwan's candid and forthcoming discussions with some of the greatest minds of his time -- Martin Amis, Christopher Ricks, Zadie Smith, Ian Hamilton, Antony Gormley, David Remnick, and Steven Pinker -- provide readers the most in-depth portrait available of the author and his works.

Readers will find McEwan to be just as engaging, humorous, and intelligent as his writings suggest. The volume includes interviews from British, Spanish, French, and American sources, two interviews previously available only in audio format, and a new interview conducted with the book's editor.

Available from the University Press of Mississippi, Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, or from a variety of Independent Booksellers.

Coming to Terms with Crisis: Disorientation and Reorientation in the Novels of Ian McEwan
Swantje Möller
Universitätsverlag Winter, 2011
ISBN: 978-3825358808

Order a copy online via the publisher Universitätsverlag WINTER, Amazon.de, or Amazon.co.uk.

From the Publisher:

The study offers a critical reading of Ian McEwan's novels by placing them in the discourse on postmodernity and ethics. Starting from the assumption that as human beings we have a fundamental need for ethical orientation which is of particular importance in a postmodern world characterised by contingency and change, the study investigates how the themes of crisis and reorientation are negotiated in McEwan's novels.

Acknowledging the central role of alterity in these novels, the study draws its theoretical framework largely from ethicists in the Levinasian tradition who, rather than arguing for normative codes of behaviour or notions of virtue, understand ethics in terms of the interactive encounters between individuals. The study therefore aims to contribute not only to the growing body of scholarship on Ian McEwan and, to a certain extent, to reorient our understanding of his writing, but also to take part in the ongoing debate about the relationship between literature and ethics.

Last update: 14 November 2011
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