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. He received his MA degree in English Literature at the University of East Anglia.

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, and his novel On Chesil Beach was named Galaxy Book of the Year at the 2008 British Book Awards. McEwan has been named the Reader's Digest Author of the Year for 2008, the 2010 Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award, and in 2011 was awarded the Jerusalem Prize.

McEwan lives in London. His new novel is Sweet Tooth. It will be published in late August by Jonathan Cape, in November by Doubleday and, first, in Brazil in July by Companhia das letras.

Serena Frome, the beautiful daughter of an Anglican bishop, has a brief affair with an older man during her final year at Cambridge, and finds herself being groomed for the intelligence service. The year is 1972. Britain, confronting economic disaster, is being torn apart by industrial unrest and terrorism and faces its fifth state of emergency. The Cold War has entered a moribund phase, but the fight goes on, especially in the cultural sphere. Serena, a compulsive reader of novels, is sent on a secret mission codenamed Sweet Tooth, which brings her into the literary world of Tom Healey, a promising young writer. First she loves his stories, then she begins to love the man. Can she maintain the fiction of her undercover life? And who is inventing whom? To answer these questions, Serena must abandon the first rule of espionage - trust no one.

Sweet Tooth will be published by Jonathan Cape at the end of August and by Doubleday in November. It will first be available in Brazil in July by Companhia das letras.

Ian McEwan's story "Hand on the Shoulder" was published in the April 30, 2012 issue of The New Yorker magazine.

The New Yorker's fiction editor Deborah Treisman also conducted an interview with McEwan about his story and upcoming novel. You may download it on iTunes or on The New Yorker website.

Treisman: Your story in this week’s issue, “Hand on the Shoulder,” is about a twenty-one-year-old university student who is tapped for British secret intelligence by an older professor at Cambridge in 1972. What drew you to this subject?

McEwan: It’s a very interesting period, I think—the Cold War—not only with respect to nuclear weapons and all the paranoia and suspicion in politics and the military but in the cultural sphere, too. It’s salutary to remember that the C.I.A. poured hundreds of millions into culture. For example, there was a festival of atonal music in Paris in 1950, entirely funded by the C.I.A. Can you imagine a less attractive festival? They paid for tours by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Abstract Expressionist art exhibitions. The aim was to persuade especially left-of-center European intellectuals that the United States was a powerhouse of culture, because there was a widespread assumption, so the C.I.A. believed, that Europeans thought America was just an empty-headed place of money and loudness, with no depth. So I wanted to try to construct a love story set against the background of this period—and the precise methods by which a young girl was drawn into the security service, MI5, were what fascinated me.

Conversations with Ian McEwan collects sixteen interviews, conducted over three decades, with the author (b. 1948) of such highly praised novels as Enduring Love, Atonement, Saturday, and On Chesil Beach.

McEwan discusses his views on authorship, the writing process, and the major themes found in his fiction, but he also expands upon his interests in music, film, global politics, the sciences, and the state of literature in contemporary society.

McEwan's candid and forthcoming discussions with some of the greatest minds of his time -- Martin Amis, Christopher Ricks, Zadie Smith, Ian Hamilton, Antony Gormley, David Remnick, and Steven Pinker -- provide readers the most in-depth portrait available of the author and his works.

Readers will find McEwan to be just as engaging, humorous, and intelligent as his writings suggest. The volume includes interviews from British, Spanish, French, and American sources, two interviews previously available only in audio format, and a new interview conducted with the book's editor.

Available from the University Press of Mississippi, Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, or from a variety of Independent Booksellers.

Last update: 23 April 2012
Ian McEwan Website Copyright © 2002-present by Ryan Roberts
Please read the disclaimer.
Send questions to Ryan Roberts