Ian Russell McEwan (born 21 June 1948) is a British novelist and screenwriter. In 2008, The Times featured him at number 35 on its list of "the 50 greatest British writers since 1945", and The Daily Telegraph ranked him number 19 out of "the 100 most powerful people in British culture".
McEwan began his career writing sparse, Gothic short stories. His first two novels, The Cement Garden (1978) and The Comfort of Strangers (1981), earned him the nickname "Ian Macabre". These were followed by three novels of some success in the late 1980s and early 1990s. His 1997 novel Enduring Love was adapted into a film of the same name. He won the Booker Prize with Amsterdam (1998). He was awarded the 1999 Shakespeare Prize.
His next novel, Atonement (2001), garnered acclaim and was adapted into an Oscar-winning film featuring Keira Knightley and James McAvoy. He received the 2011 Jerusalem Prize. His later novels have included The Children Act, Nutshell, and Machines Like Me. His latest novel, about climate change, is What We Can Know.
Early life and education McEwan was born in Aldershot, Hampshire, on 21 June 1948, the son of David McEwan and Rose Lilian Violet (née Moore). His father was a working-class Scotsman who had worked his way up through the army to the rank of major.
McEwan spent much of his childhood in East Asia (including Singapore), Germany, and North Africa (including Libya), where his father was posted. His family returned to England when he was 12 years old. He was educated at Woolverstone Hall School in Suffolk; the University of Sussex, where he received a degree in English literature in 1970; and the University of East Anglia, where he undertook a master's degree in literature (with the option to submit creative writing instead of a critical dissertation).Jaillant, Lise. "Myth Maker: Malcolm Bradbury and the Creation of Creative Writing at UEA". New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing (2016)
Career
1975–1987: Short stories and "Ian Macabre" phase McEwan's first published work was a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites (1975), which won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976. He achieved notoriety in 1979 when the BBC suspended production of his play Solid Geometry because of its supposed obscenity.Ian McEwan: Writers and Their Work by Kiernan Ryan publ 1994 His second collection of short stories, In Between the Sheets, was published in 1978. The Cement Garden (1978) and The Comfort of Strangers (1981), his two earliest novels, were both adapted into films. The nature of these works caused him to be nicknamed "Ian Macabre". These were followed by his first book for children, Rose Blanche (1985), and a return to literary fiction with The Child in Time (1987), winner of the 1987 Whitbread Novel Award.
1988–2007: Mainstream success and Booker Prize win After The Child in Time, McEwan began to move away from the darker, more unsettling material of his earlier career and towards the style that would see him reach a wider readership and gain significant critical acclaim. This new phase began with the publication of the mid-Cold War espionage drama The Innocent (1990), and Black Dogs (1992), a quasi companion-piece reflecting on the aftermath of the Nazi era in Europe and the end of the Cold War. McEwan followed these works with his second book for children, The Daydreamer (1994).
Enduring Love (1997), about the relationship between a science writer and a stalker, was popular with critics, although it was not shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It was adapted into a film in 2004. In 1998, he won the Booker Prize for Amsterdam. His next novel, Atonement (2001), received considerable acclaim; Time magazine named it the best novel of 2002, and it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.Man Booker Prize Website Retrieved 13 April 2010 In 2007, the critically acclaimed film Atonement, directed by Joe Wright and starring Keira Knightley and James McAvoy, was released in cinemas worldwide. His next work, Saturday (2005), follows an especially eventful day in the life of a successful neurosurgeon. Saturday won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for 2005. His novel On Chesil Beach (2007) was shortlisted for the 2007 Man Booker Prize and was adapted into a film starring Saoirse Ronan in 2017, for which McEwan wrote the screenplay. McEwan has also written a number of produced screenplays, a stage play, children's fiction, and an oratorio and a libretto titled For You with music composed by Michael Berkeley.
In 2006, McEwan was accused of plagiarism; specifically that a passage in Atonement (2001) closely echoed a passage from a memoir, No Time for Romance, published in 1977 by Lucilla Andrews. McEwan acknowledged using the book as a source for his work. McEwan had included a brief note at the end of Atonement, referring to Andrews's autobiography, among several other works. The incident recalled critical controversy over his debut novel The Cement Garden, key elements of the plot of which closely mirrored some of those of Our Mother's House, a 1963 novel by British author Julian Gloag, which had also been made into a film. McEwan denied charges of plagiarism, claiming he was unaware of the earlier work. Writing in The Guardian in November 2006, a month after Andrews' death, McEwan professed innocence of plagiarism while acknowledging his debt to the author of No Time for Romance. Several authors defended him, including John Updike, Martin Amis, Margaret Atwood, Thomas Keneally, Kazuo Ishiguro, Zadie Smith, and Thomas Pynchon.
2008–present: Political works and continued acclaim McEwan's first novel of the 2010s, Solar, was published by Jonathan Cape and Doubleday in March 2010. In June 2008 at the Hay Festival, McEwan gave a surprise reading of this work-in-progress. The novel includes "a scientist who hopes to save the planet" from the threat of climate change, with inspiration for the novel coming from a Cape Farewell expedition McEwan made in 2005 in which "artists and scientists ... spent several weeks aboard a ship near the north pole discussing environmental concerns". McEwan observed: "The novel's protagonist Michael Beard has been awarded a Nobel prize for his pioneering work on physics, and has discovered that winning the coveted prize has interfered with his work." He said that the work was not a comedy: "I hate comic novels; it's like being wrestled to the ground and being tickled, being forced to laugh", instead, that it had extended comic stretches.
Solar was followed by McEwan's twelfth novel, Sweet Tooth, a meta-fictional historical novel set in the 1970s, and was published in late August 2012."Sweet Tooth" , at IanMcEwan.com. In an interview with The Scotsman newspaper to coincide with publication, McEwan revealed that the impetus for writing Sweet Tooth had been "a way in which I can write a disguised autobiography". He revealed in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, in November 2012, that the film rights to Sweet Tooth had been bought by Working Title Films – the company that had adapted Atonement as a film. Sweet Tooth was followed two years later by The Children Act, which concerned High Court judges, UK family law, and the right to die.
Two years after The Children Act, McEwan's 2016 novel Nutshell, a short novel closer in style and tone to his earlier works, was published. McEwan's next work, a short novella, was titled My Purple Scented Novel – part of which was published previously as a short story by the same title in The New Yorker in 2016. This short work was published to mark McEwan's 70th birthday in June 2018. McEwan followed Nutshell in April 2019 with the alternate history/science fiction novel Machines Like Me. It concerns artificial intelligence and an alternate history in which Great Britain loses the Falklands War and the Labour Party, led by Tony Benn, eventually wins the 1987 UK general election. In September 2019, McEwan announced a quick surprise follow-up novella inspired by Brexit, The Cockroach. McEwan published his novel Lessons in 2022 to much critical acclaim. Andrew Billen of The Times calls it McEwan's "500-page masterpiece", and The New Statesman claims the novel "may well be remembered as one of the finest humanist novels of its age".
In 2025, McEwan published his 18th novel What We Can Know, which follows the academic Tom Metcalfe. Set in a 2120 dystopia, Metcalfe and a companion search for a long-lost poem. The book received positive reviews from several critics, including Dwight Gardner of The New York Times, who described the book as the best written by the author in years.
Style, themes and influences McEwan's work has often explored psychological tension, moral complexity, and the consequences of seemingly small actions. His early short stories and novels, such as First Love, Last Rites and The Cement Garden, earned him a reputation for unsettling and gothic themes. As his career progressed, McEwan shifted toward broader socio-political subjects and more nuanced emotional landscapes. Atonement, for instance, reflects on memory, guilt, and historical trauma, while Saturday probes post-9/11 anxiety through the lens of one day in the life of a neurosurgeon. His later works, such as Solar and Machines Like Me, incorporate speculative and satirical elements, tackling topics like climate change and artificial intelligence. Across his oeuvre, McEwan is noted for precise prose, formal control, and an interest in scientific as well as literary themes. He cites Edward Slingerland's What Science Offers the Humanities as an influence: I would like to inhabit a glorious mental space in which books like Slingerland’s would not need to be written. In other words – and this comes back to the notion of mental freedom – your average literary intellectual, just as much as your average research scientist, would take for granted a field of study in which the humanities and sciences were fluid, or lay along a spectrum of enquiry. This is the grand enlightenment dream of unified knowledge. If you think of the novel as an exploration or investigation into human nature, well, science undertakes a parallel pursuit. Among poets, he cites the influence of Philip Larkin: "His poems are part of my mental furniture." He says John Updike "has been a very important writer for me, the one I’ve admired most, read most, and returned to most often."
Honours and awards McEwan has been nominated for the Booker Prize six times to date, winning the prize for Amsterdam in 1998. His other nominations were for The Comfort of Strangers (1981, shortlisted), Black Dogs (1992, shortlisted), Atonement (2001, shortlisted), Saturday (2005, longlisted), and On Chesil Beach (2007, shortlisted). McEwan also received nominations for the International Booker Prize in 2005 and 2007. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL), a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA), a Fellow of the Society of Authors, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was awarded the annual Shakespeare Prize by the Alfred Toepfer Foundation, Hamburg, in 1999. He is also a Distinguished Supporter of Humanists UK. He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2000 New Year Honours for services to literature. In 2005, he was the first recipient of Dickinson College's Harold and Ethel L. Stellfox Visiting Scholar and Writers Program Award, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. In 2008, McEwan was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Literature by University College London, where he had previously taught English literature.