Ian McEwan- Biography In Eglish

Ian McEwan

Brief introduction to him

-Ian Russel McEwan is an English novelist and screenwriter.

-He was born in1948 in Aldershot, England.

-His father was a Scottish major in the army.Therefore he spent much of his childhood in East Asia ,Germany and North Africa. His family returned to England when he was twelve.

-He studied Literature at the University of Sussex .

-McEwan lives now in London. He has been married twice and has two sons.

- He sees in literature a way to give messages, and he likes experimentation in his work, he often uses provocative resources with which he intends to make the reader react and think. In his latest work he has quiet down, some critics miss his narrative sadism , others still consider him intellectually stimulating.

-His works have received worldwide critical acclaim. In 2008, The Times put him on their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".

His career , and some of his awards

McEwan began his career writing short stories First Love, Last Rites (1975), which won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976.

Then he began to write novels, the two first were adapted into films.His refined prose style accentuates the horror of his dark humour.

He was nicknamed “Ian Macabre” because these novels were very violent.

His name was notorious in 1979, when the BBC suspended on Television his play Solid Geometry because of its supposed obscenity.

These were followed by novels of some success in the 1980s and early 1990s .

In later novels McEwan moved away from more perverse themes. Then he wrote about psychology of his characters, and about extreme situations that impact normal people. The Child in Time (1987), tells of the terrible repercussion a baby's kidnapping has on her parents.

In 1985 with his screenplay for The Ploughman's Lunch (1985) he criticised Margaret Thatcher´s government.

In 1998, he won the Man Booker Prize for his novel Amsterdam.

He was awarded the Shakespeare Prize by the Alfred Toepfer Foundation, Hamburg, in 1999.

In 2001, he published the novel Atonement, which was made into an Oscar-winning film.

The novel Solar 2010 includes "a scientist who hopes to save the planet" from the threat of climate change.

McEwan's twelfth and last novel, Sweet Tooth (2012), is historical in nature and set in the 1970s. In an interview McEwan revealed that for him it was a “disguised autobiography”.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

McEwan has also written

-a number of produced screenplays,

-a stage play,

-children's fiction,

- a libretto titled

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