Ien Makyuen

Ian McEwan is a British writer, screenwriter, and playwright, and the recipient of the Somerset Maugham Award, the Booker Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society.

He was born in a military town to Rosa Lilian Violet and David McEwan. He spent most of his childhood on military bases in East Asia, Germany, and North Africa, where his father, a career officer in the British Army, was stationed. When the boy was 12, the family returned to England.

In 1959, Ian was admitted to the Woolverstone boarding school in Suffolk, where he developed an interest in English Romantic poetry and contemporary American and English fiction. After graduating in 1966, he worked for some time in London as a garbage collector before enrolling at the University of Sussex in Brighton. Graduating with honors, he received a bachelor’s degree in English literature (1970). He was then admitted to the University of East Anglia. There he was among the first graduates of the pioneering Creative Writing course, taught by writers Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson. In 1971, Ian McEwan received a master’s degree.

In 1975, McEwan’s first short story collection, First Love, Last Rites, was published. Three years later he released another collection of short fiction, In Between the Sheets, and his first novel, The Cement Garden. In 1981, his second novel, The Comfort of Strangers, was published. All these works are built around the author’s interest in depicting sexual and mental perversions, for which McEwan himself received the nickname “Macaabre” (dark, gloomy).

The period from 1981 to 1987, when the novel The Child in Time was published, is considered a kind of turning point in McEwan’s work — it was during this time that the author switched from “pathology” to “norm.” Since 1990, he has published seven novels that have made him one of the most successful and influential writers in contemporary Britain. He has been nominated several times for the Booker Prize, which he eventually won in 1998 for the novel