Ien Rassell Makyuen

Ian McEwan is a British novelist, screenwriter, and playwright, winner 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 on a military base into the family of Rosa Lillian 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 modern 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 innovative Creative Writing course taught by the writers Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson. In 1971, Ian McEwan received his 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 prose, 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 the depiction of sexual and mental perversions, which earned McEwan the nickname “Macabre” (dark, gloomy).

The period from 1981 to 1987, when the novel The Child in Time was published, is regarded as a kind of watershed in McEwan’s work — it was at this time that the author shifted from “pathology” to “normality.” Since 1990, he has published seven novels that 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 ultimately won in 1998 for the novel