Ian McEwan

British · born 1948

Born Ian Russell McEwan on June 21, 1948, in Aldershot, Hampshire, the son of a working-class Scotsman who had risen through the army to the rank of major and a homemaker mother, he spent much of his childhood in army postings in Singapore, Germany, and Libya, returning to England at twelve. He was educated at Woolverstone Hall School in Suffolk, then read English at the University of Sussex, and went on to the University of East Anglia for a master's degree where he had the option of submitting creative writing in place of a critical thesis, a path that produced the stories of his first book. First Love, Last Rites (1975) won the Somerset Maugham Award and announced a writer with a taste for cold rooms and unsettled families, earning him the nickname "Ian Macabre." The Cement Garden (1978) and The Comfort of Strangers (1981) followed, both later filmed. The Child in Time (1987) and Black Dogs (1992) moved him toward a more public moral terrain. He won the Booker Prize in 1998 for Amsterdam. Atonement (2001) is the work for which he is most widely known, a novel about a young girl's misreading of an act she half-witnessed and the seventy years she spends paying for it; the 2007 film adaptation starring Keira Knightley and James McAvoy earned him a fresh global audience. Saturday (2005), On Chesil Beach (2007), Solar (2010), and The Children Act (2014) extended his range across neurosurgery, climate change, and the law. He was awarded the Jerusalem Prize in 2011 and remains an active novelist, dividing his time between London and the Cotswolds.