Ian+McEwan+Biography

Biography

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. While completing his MA degree in English Literature at the University of East Anglia, he took a creative writing course taught by the novelists Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson. 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//.

There are a lot of writers out there who taut themselves as masters of the macabre, who describe their work as "dark" or "disturbing." However, most of them couldn't hold a snubbed candle to Ian McEwan, whose work has been redefining how dark dark can be for over thirty years. Through seriously demented novels such as //The Cement Garden//, //Atonement//, //The Comfort of Strangers//, and //Enduring Love//, McEwan has explored the outer rims of sadism, sick sex, and surreal scenarios. With his thirteenth book, //Saturday//, the always unpredictable McEwan has taken a true turn for the unexpected.

Anyone who has ever read anything by Ian McEwan knows well that he does not shy away from shock value. In //The Cement Garden// he creeped out readers with a tale about orphans who hide their mother's corpse in their cellar before degenerating into a feral state. In //The Comfort of Strangers// he described a European vacation marred by a sadomasochistic murder. In his masterful //Atonement// he explored a child's twisted sense of morality against a World War II backdrop. He has even brought his singularly grisly vision to children's lit in //Rose Blanche// and //The Daydreamer//, a spooky yarn about a boy who uses his imagination to escape his dull reality. Of course, Ian McEwan is hardly a low-brow purveyor of cheap thrills. His prose is economic, but elegant, and his insights into the human condition give his often unsavory subject matter a great degree of depth. These are the qualities that particularly drive his latest novel //Saturday//.